


Two Little Girls In Two Straight Lines

by pinkbagels



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Eurus is whacked, Extended Family, Gothic, Greg is pretty tough stuff, M/M, Macabre, Twins, Uncle Rudy - Freeform, casefic, disturbing imagery, hidden histories, murderfic, questionable parenting, secrets and lies, twenty one years
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2018-12-23 01:36:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 56,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11979351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkbagels/pseuds/pinkbagels
Summary: Family secrets can't be kept indefinitely.  Mycroft should have learned his lesson with Eurus.Unwittingly, he has given his insane sister the ammunition needed to destroy him.'Two little girls in two straight lines. The smallest one is Madeline.'





	1. swamp

**Author's Note:**

> This is an idea I've been bantering about for quite some time and it's finally encompassing The Final Problem in a way I'm happy to explore. I just don't think the whole 'Oops, she just wanted her baby brother back' thing was satisfying at all. She's a brutal killer without a conscience. There is no care, no frightened child in need of comfort. Everything to her will always be a game, and Sherlock doesn't realize he's still playing one.

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN TWO STRAIGHT LINES  
chapter one

The subterfuge had been easy. They were well aware that they could tax even the most experienced teacher's patience, and when the phone call was put through stating that they were both ill and wouldn't be attending school that day, the receptionist sounded, to Madeline, relieved. They had been seated in front of her desk nearly every day this week, their animated chatter grating on her nerves, as well they knew it would. She was a middle aged woman who went home to a quiet flat to her fat orange tabby who, Madeline had noted, lounged in a picture frame on the corner of her desk. She was orderly and neat and not at all a fan of chaos, which always made Caroline wonder why she became the receptionist of a public London elementary school. Madeline suggested it was because of the generous retirement package. Caroline didn't believe the woman was capable of thinking that far ahead.

"I think she has a crush on the principal," Caroline said, and Madeline squished up her little nose and said that's silly, the man smells like boiled cabbage and is just about as interesting.

Thus, the phone call was not questioned and Madeline's superior acting skills at imitating their Grandmere's thick French accent, coated as it always was in red wine and cigarettes, had made their adventure possible. They'd loaded their backpacks not with books, but packets of crisps, two baggies of stale mince pasties and a KitKat bar they would share between them. Caroline made sure she had Madeline's asthmatic inhaler tucked into the front pocket of her penguin shaped backpack. It was a chilly late October morning and the air in the Tube was close and dusty, a prime environment for triggering an attack.

They both had six pounds each, a two way fare that would get them from their home near the Mall to their final destination and back.

Caroline held the map of the Tube. She had circled Baker Street Station in bright, pink fluorescent marker.

"221B," Caroline reminded her little sister, Madeline, and though she was only aged two minutes senior of the pair she was the more outspoken, confident leader while Madeline was the quieter, philosophical type and the secretive generator of ideas. Usually good ones, Caroline had to admit, and which she eagerly praised Madeline for.

Plum, so named for the purplish hue of his wide mouth, licked at their backpacks, one shaped into a pink penguin for Caroline and the other a green frog for Madeline. The dog's thick tongue worried at the zipper in an attempt to open it and steal the bagged up pasties. Caroline shooed the stocky Staffordshire terrier away, ignoring his broken hearted whines as she slid on her backpack. Madeline did the same and they both slid out the back door of their small home and began the journey down the long, hidden lane that wound behind several severe government buildings, until they came up behind Waterstones on Jermyn Street. Cutting through a small cemented path, from there they made their way across the busy main to Piccadilly Station.

London is a busy, world class city of bustling, hurried citizens and is well used to seeing all manner of class journeying across its hundreds year old confines. Two eight year old twin girls who clearly knew where they were going did not raise the brows of London Underground commuters, though one or two may have noticed them enough to inwardly remark that they would be pretty little things if someone would take a brush to their unruly mops of thick, curly blonde hair that hung past their shoulders. And what were their parents thinking, dressing them in velvet black leggings and complimentary black velvet smocks, their equally matching, huge starkly blue eyes in that halo of blonde hair making them look like Funko doll ghosts. Worn black and white converse sneakers ended the ensemble. They were easy to spot in a crowd.

Their arrival at Baker Street was uneventful, and, just as Madeline had predicted, 221B was near the underground exit. It was a rather anonymous location, sandwiched in a sliver beside a chips shop, and they both looked up in unison at the crooked door knocker, pondering it in silence and in an equally silent agreement decided this was not how they were going to get in.

221B, Baker Street is in a century old building, its corner facing Regent Park. It has what many structures that old do, namely an abandoned basement and a likewise forgotten broken window that gives all manner of vermin access. There was a light on in the basement room. The alleyway leading into the space had recently been built over, adding a few feet of expansion within the building, and the basement window was enclosed in a concrete cubby. Both Caroline and Madeline had to crouch through the small opening that led to the cracked basement window, their pristine backpacks now smeared with muck. Luckily, the window wasn't locked so it was easy for Caroline to open it and shimmy her way in, her feet landing on the cracked linoleum floor with a tiny splash. Madeline followed her, though her foot hit a larger puddle and she complained about her soaked socks. The backpacks hadn't fared very well, either, having fallen to the floor on their entrance and the damp basement, now discovered to be more swamp than residence, was making them both wonder if they'd made a grave mistake.

"You're *sure* it was 221B?" Caroline asked Madeline, and her little sister sagely nodded her head.

The bare light bulb illuminating the abandoned basement room was covered in cobwebs. Caroline shrugged as Madeline headed out of the room ahead of her, opening the creaking door which revealed a cramped hallway covered in peeling plaster. A shot of confidence hit her when she noted this was 221C.

"Come on," Madeline whispered to her sister from her perch further up the stairs. Caroline stifled a giggle and followed her, creeping upwards past the main floor, where 221A housed what was, presumably, the landlady, and then up the creaking set of stairs shrouded in darkness that led to their final destination.

It was all quite exciting, and Caroline turned to her little sister with a wide grin that was answered in kind. 'How smart Madeline is!' Caroline thought. Madeline, for her part, was looking at her big sister and thinking, 'How brave Caroline is!' For here they were, at their planned destination after weeks of discussion and hope, on the threshold of a myriad answers to an equal amount of questions.

Caroline remembers how it started. It was after their birthday on September third, and after their party which their three hyperactive cousins had attended and nearly blew up the BBQ by spraying hairspray on it and Auntie Helene had gotten very drunk and disorderly and the fancy neighbours called the cops when she started cursing out Grandmere in fluent French, after all of that, when Madeline and Caroline were huddled beneath the duvet on the floor in their living room, watching Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth, they had listened to their parents argue in hushed tones, constantly shushing one another, fearful of being overheard. Which, naturally, they were.

"Baker Street is not a viable home for her."

"Of course it is, it's manky, sure, but there's no reason to be so up in arms about it. All they have to do is fix that slope flooding the basement and put a vent there for air circulation instead of a window. It's just old. It's no better than this place. "

"That is insulting. You take that back. You know the only reason there is detritus here is due to your sister's maniacal brood."

"221B is an old property, I'll give you that, but there's no reason to believe it unsafe."

"It's unsafe because *he's* there."

"That's a right different sort of mould."

"He's been visiting her. She knows where he lives. It's not a safe place for a baby."

Their Daddy sucked in a long breath of air. Madeline turned down the volume on the TV, flicking Caroline's fingers away from the mute button.

"We're back to this, then. I know you don't like it, and neither do I, he don't rightly know what he's walking into. But if he's that determined to visit her there's nothing you can do. He's looking for answers he won't get."

"You know this. *I* know this. It's purposeful ignorance on his part, and we need to put a stop to it before it's too late."

"John's not a stupid man, he damned well knows the risks that bloody bastard is taking and it's not up to us to warn him off. As for Himself, he won't leave 221B. It's like uprooting an oak. It's got significance for him now, and maybe there is some sort of metaphysical hold on the place. Keeps getting rebuilt, don't it? You can throw every bomb you want at it and it'll still stand."

"That description is not helping your argument."

"We're not arguing about a thing. Oi! Girls! What you watching, is that an old Vincent Price movie? Ha! Look at that. Every silly post-war B-Movie known to man and they pick the most existential thing on the shelf. How's my little moppet Sartres, then?" Their father mussed at their hair through the duvet before picking up the empty plastic bowl in front of them. "More popcorn! On its way!"

Curiosity had festered until it had become a malignant growth on their consciousness that had to be removed. The mysterious Baker Street and 221B had latched upon them with increasing significance through the month of September and through the first weeks of October until their plan was fully formed and the mystery, whatever it was, was to be solved.

Water cascaded down the ceiling in the basement, dripping into puddles that were inches deep. After a few hushed steps they were quick to realize that there was no one in the house, and they were free to become their usual boisterous, stomping selves. They ran up the third storey stairs two at a time, hopping over the black and white lino flooring in an improvised game of hopscotch before coming to the open door leading into what looked to be a ragged apartment.

221B! They found it!

The smell hit them first and they both crinkled their noses against it. Their own home was disorganized but it never *stank*, and it never had layers of dust collected over everything to the point that it felt like chunks on the back of one's tongue. The smell reminded Madeline of the time Plum had dug into the garbage while it was raining outside. Wet dog and organic waste.

But it wasn't all bad. The small apartment had lots of interesting bits layered all over it in a wild collage of information, and Madeline and Caroline eagerly climbed all over it. They dropped their backpacks onto the kitchen table, upsetting a few beakers and spilling strange green liquid onto the floor. The sitting room had two chairs and a worn couch, which they checked out in turn by jumping from one to the other in triangular acrobatics until the springs bent. They picked up the skull on the fireplace mantel and poked their fingers through the bullet hole in the back of it, testing its circumference. They both agreed it was an instant death, and definitely murder.

They asked the skull if it deserved it, and it seemed to suggest that it didn't. They felt bad for it, and placed it back where they found it.

They went over every nook and cranny of the apartment, spilling out artwork from one of the many bookcases and propping up their favourites (Edward Gorey! How fun!) and wandering into the kitchen to investigate the beakers full of weird smelling fluids (one of them had pickled fingers that smelled vaguely floral).

At last they were hungry after their long journey and thorough investigation, which still hadn't given them the answers they sought, and they both agreed that this sort of thinking required ample amounts of crisps and pasties. Unfortunately, the pasties were ruined when they'd entered into the building through the basement and they were now a sopping, black mess swilling in plastic baggies. The crisps were safe, though, as was the KitKat. Madeline coughed, and Caroline handed her the asthmatic inhaler, which she took a puff from before digging into her crisps.

They hadn't thought to bring drinks, and it was Madeline who opened the refrigerator door, seeking pop.

A severed head on a faded flowered plate greeted her.

Now this was new. Caroline wondered if this meant that the owner of 221B was a serial killer, but Madeline doubted it, the skull in the sitting room was too old and the pristine, neat little room upstairs along with the pram suggested that there were two people living here as well as a baby and serial killers usually worked alone and weren't exactly open about their deadly hobbies with their family members.

"Daddy says killers have no regard for their victims." Madeline's soft voice was nearly absorbed into the hum of the refrigerator. She pointed at the plate. "All the other plates have chips in the rims. I think whoever put this head here wanted to be nice, in their own way."

Caroline sniffed the inside of the fridge. "It smells like Daddy's flask. I think it's being preserved."

"That means the person is trying to keep it for some purpose. Why else put it in a fridge? It doesn't look like a very healthy head. Maybe we should have a seance and ask it how it died."

"Oh, we should!" Caroline exclaimed. She felt giddy at the prospect. "I saw candles in that drawer over there, and I saw a pack of cards in the room upstairs! Let's ask it if it knows who lives here!"

Madeline grinned at her older twin sister. "Do you think we'll get an answer?"

"Daddy says impressions and gut feelings are sometimes answers. I say it's because the universe can hear questions and it is obliged to answer them. That's why we like patterns. There's answers in patterns. Did you find any matches? I've got a black marker!"

They both decided that the sitting room was the best place for such a project. It was loads of fun to be able to enjoy their favourite macabre activity openly and not in secret for a change. Daddy didn't mind that they had a copy of the Necromonicon and the Egyptian Book of the Dead side by side on their bedside shelf, and he found it funny that they lined their walls with posters of Nosferatu and Metropolis. Even Grandmere got them a Ouija board for Christmas.

Their other parent, however, was not happy with their hobbies and interests, and kept trying to steer them towards logic and science, which they did appreciate. But imagination is sparked by more than one branch of influence, and in the case of Madeline and Caroline it was the prospect of multidimensionality that appealed to them most.

"Oh look!" Caroline exclaimed after opening one of the kitchen drawers. She held up a handful of sweet smelling sticks, her grin cutting across her face. "Incense!"

"They smell like jasmine," Madeline said. Then, her eyes wide with understanding. "Open that cupboard above your head!"

Caroline did as asked. She pulled down a small tin. "Jasmine tea!" she exclaimed.

Madeline clapped her hands together in glee. "The pattern! It's flowers! Even the plate, look! Jasmine!"

Caroline opened the tin, only to be surprised by the lack of dried herbs within it. She pulled out a wad of papers, all with notes and numbers written on them, some saying 'PAID' and others saying 'IGNORE'. They were mostly bills, some for electricians, a window company and a notice stating the resident's Internet account had been terminated. The others were for building contractors who had reverted to using a collection agency.

It was the name on the bills that shocked the girls. Caroline dropped the incense sticks she had been holding to the kitchen floor.

"Attention: SHERLOCK HOLMES  
Royal Collection Agency c/o Randy's Construction

You are currently in arrears for repairs done to the outside facade of 221 Baker Street in the amount of $228,966. Interest accruing daily at 10%.

Please pay this amount immediately. If we do not receive payment from you by November 21, 20--, criminal proceedings will commence."

Caroline and Madeline stared and stared at the name.

Sherlock HOLMES.

HOLMES.

"That's our last name," Madeline whispered.

They stood in the kitchen, rooted to the spot.

Caroline glanced at the head on the flowered plate.

"Thank you for telling us," she said to it.

***

"What an utter waste of time. Are all lawyers so vapid? Ignoring the facts, making jabs at my mental state, insinuating I am numerically deficient--The nerve of that weasel! To think we were forced into a meeting with that greasy suit instead of following our leads in the Blood Sapphire case which we are on the cusp of solving. These petty annoyances must not get in the way of The Work!"

John let out a long suffering sigh behind Sherlock's back. "We are over $300,000 in arrears in our bills, Sherlock. Between the construction company and the city charging us for reinstalling the street's plumbing system, we're beyond bankrupt. And you have to stop stealing the chip shop's WiFi, Kareem is getting wise to it. He got a six hundred dollar roaming fee last month and lo and behold, it coincided with the day our Internet was yanked."

Times had indeed been tough. Since Sherrinford, they'd had a number of cases but none of them paid the amounts needed and they were barely scraping by. Sherlock had a terrible habit of taking on freebies simply because they were interesting, a habit John was doing his best to quash. With their Internet gone, he was forced to update his blog at the local library. He'd already gone over his hour long limit on Internet usage twice and earned fines. More bills they couldn't pay.

John crossed his arms as Sherlock stood in front of the door to 221B, staring at the knocker with a look of concentration. "As for the lawyer, he's basically trying to plead that you had no idea you'd be footing the bill for these repairs, the destruction did come from forces outside of your control. Acting like you don't know basic accounting will be in our favour. He's doing what he can to get the creditors off of our backs and get them rerouted to the proper authority, namely the British Government."

"He's an idiot," Sherlock said, and he bent over and sniffed the lock. "We can't trust a man who votes Tory and is suffering the beginning effects of liver disease, he's on his way out and knows it and with mortality breathing down his neck like that what impetus is there for him to win our case? He's bankrupt himself. His shoes, once costly, are scuffed and his office hadn't been cleaned by a service in months. There's a hint of yellow jaundice around his brow. He can't afford simple upkeep and luxuries. Dying and poor, he's drinking himself to death and leaving us with an even bigger tab. No, we'll have the money when we solve the Blood Sapphire case, which we will do if we don't have to pay a portion of our earnings on a crooked palliative lawyer's fees. As for the British Government, Mycroft would be perfectly willing to let me wallow in poverty just to put me in his debt. Time in a mad sister's pit does little to change an entire personality trait, John. My brother is still a man obsessed with control."

Sherlock frowned, still staring at the door. It was cold outside, and John tried to warm up his hands in his pockets, his feet stomping on the pavement in front of their door. "Are we going in?"

"Yes," Sherlock said, distracted.

He didn't move.

"I believe that would involve turning the key in the lock and actually opening the door."

"Perhaps." Sherlock frowned and stepped away from the door. With long strides he paced away from it until he was at the alleyway that had been mostly sealed by the contractors save for the small concrete gap on the ground. He flopped on his belly to the sidewalk and peered down the gap at the cracked window that was the only indication that the Baker Street address had a basement room.

He stood up, still frowning, while John hissed into the cold air, rubbing his hands together in a futile attempt to warm them.

"We are not alone," Sherlock said.

"Mrs. Hudson came back from visiting her sister already? I thought she was taking Rosie there overnight. Her sister was looking forward to it."

"No. We have intruders."

Sherlock narrowed his eyes and quickly scanned the street. John stood back, trying not to allow the fear he felt welling within him show.

Sherlock glanced at him and blinked, confused. "Two little girls are hardly a threat, John."

"I...What?"

"Eight years old, I would suspect, this looks to be a frog leg torn from a novelty backpack and that is the age range for such a design. There is a shred from a ticket stub, indicative they rode the underground, confirming they are at an age that their appearance riding the tube on their own wouldn't arouse interest. Long, curly blonde hair, not brushed as often as it should be simply because they don't like having their hair styled. There are black fibres around the window. Black velvet leggings."

Sherlock shuddered, which did not afford John much confidence that what they were about to confront in the flat was benign. Alarm bells rang hard and fast as Sherlock grimaced and braced himself to enter the flat.

"Twins," he sneered.

John nodded, then shook his head.

Right. No. Wrong. What?

"Twins?"

"Yes."

"But it's never twins."

"I assure you, they are." Sherlock shivered.

"Then...What? I should be ready to football tackle a couple of eight year olds, is that what you're implying?"

"Of course not, John, they are children, what's wrong with you?"

"What's wrong with *you*?" John unlocked the door and opened it, stepping into the flat while Sherlock lingered behind. He stood on the front step, ushering the lanky fool in. "Well?"

Sherlock shifted foot to foot, looking increasing uncomfortable.

"They're creepy," he said.

John was losing every measure of his patience. "I'm sorry?"

"Twins," Sherlock whined. "They're creepy." He still hung back, refusing to go into the flat. "Imagine it, John, having someone identical to oneself, the same synapses within the brain, the same fingerprints, the same complex composition of everything that creates you, doubled. What a strange world that is, where there is another so intrinsically close to who you are they walk between the ghost of your possibilities and the truth of self. It's unsettling."

John nodded from his position at the opened front door. "Creepy," he repeated.

"Quite."

"Yeah, well, Redrum and all that. For God's sake, Sherlock, according to you they are eight years old. Get the hell in the damned flat."

Sherlock complied, although it seemed to take all of his resolve to do so. John bid him to follow him upstairs, where, yes, he could hear the murmur of childish voices drifting downwards, until he was flush with his apartment door which had been left slightly ajar. The flicker of candlelight cascaded beneath the door, and John waited for Sherlock to catch up before walking in and surprising their pint sized intruders.

"They're just kids," John said, shaking his head. He stepped into the flat.

Oh.

Oh dear God.

John Watson has witnessed many an uncomfortable scene in his life, and living with Sherlock Holmes has added to the repertoire. Between the bombed out bodies of Afghanistan to Sherlock's hammering of a corpse to determine the exact parameters of blood splatter, John Watson has seen it all. Such shocking images rarely fazed him, he was an army surgeon who had to thread the agonized human body together on a daily basis and Sherlock's odd experiments were more sources of amusement than nightmare.

But there is an instinctual horror involved when seeing children alongside corpses, and these two particular little ladies had upped the ante when it came to nightmare fuel. The severed head Sherlock had been routinely dousing in whiskey to determine why a client's husband had been brined in an oak barrel was now set in the centre of the sitting room, a ring of tea light candles surrounding it. A deck of playing cards John had brought back from a trip to the Empire Casino had been used to spell out the alphabet, the backs of the cards neatly drawn on with black sharpie marker. They'd placed the cards in a tight circle in front of the severed head. An empty, overturned mason jar became the mechanism for channelling the dead.

Two identical blonde, eight year old girls dressed in velvet black and as pale as the spectres they were attempting to resurrect had their fingertips on the rounded bottom of the mason jar, the jar moving in tight circles that hovered closer and closer to the letter 'y'.

"I told you," the girl on the right whispered to the other, and her voice was eerily sibilant.

"He's our uncle," the other answered, in an identical cadence. "I don't think he looks like a spoiled prat." She gave the head in the centre of the floor a quizzical look. "He looks ordinary and kind of put upon, like if he's happy he doubts it."

"It's being mean," the other little girl agreed.

John felt his blood freeze solid in his veins. "Sh-Sherlock?"

The little girl to the left bounded from the floor into John's chair where she rested her chin on the back of it and stared, wide-eyed at Sherlock. John fought the mental image that she looked like a severed head herself.

"Oh! Madeline, it's this one that's our uncle! Look at the way he looks at us so shifty! It was right after all!"

Madeline squished her nose as she peered up at Sherlock, who was stone faced at their scrutiny. "He don't look like MyMy's brother. Maybe he's a more distant relation?"

"Don't be silly Madeline," Caroline said, flicking her blonde hair out of her eyes. "You don't try to condemn the houses of cousins."

MyMy?

Was she trying to say Mommy?

"They don't look alike," the girl in John's chair agreed, her pale chin a heavy contrast against the chair's dark fabric. "His mouth is mealy and his features are kind of asymmetrical. He wears his shirts too tight. MyMy is much prettier."

"Right," John said, since Sherlock was playing dumb. He noted the small bead of sweat that was forming above Sherlock's upper lip.

Frightened. Sherlock was frightened.

But...Weird as they were, *creepy* as they most definitely were, John's immediate instincts told him they were just little girls and it was clear they meant no harm even if their precocious delivery was a tad macabre. "You shouldn't be playing with severed heads," John said, and they shrugged back at him.

"He was the one who had it in the fridge," the girl in John's chair said. Caroline. And the one on the floor still, putting the marked playing cards in the mason jar, she was Madeline. Caroline flipped her long, blonde hair over her shoulder and turned to her sister. "But I guess we should be a bit more respectful, seeing as how helpful it was. Daddy says its very important to be mindful of the dead, where and how you find them can put bad people away so they can't hurt anyone else. Madeline, do put him back in the fridge. He's looking more poorly than ever."

Madeline cheerfully obliged, but she paused when she walked by Sherlock, who stared down at her sweet, pale face framed with blonde curls. Massive blue eyes the colour of cobalt stared back up at him.

"He doesn't like it when you make him drink," she whispered. The head wobbled on the plate, too heavy for her small grasp.

"Sherlock, take the damned head and put it back in the fridge where it belongs." John bit down on his words, wondering if it was worth expanding on the strangeness of that statement and decided against it. Instead, John nodded at him and Sherlock was still rooted at the spot, staring down at Madeline as though she was the most terrifying thing he'd ever met in his life.

Yes, he had to agree, creepy little twins, but come on... Nothing could possibly be worse than Eurus.

A flash of dark hair, blood, screams and sing song games and John had to shake his head to clear it. No. Nothing was worse than *her*.

What the hell was wrong with Sherlock? He hadn't said a word to them yet, and even John had figured out they were weird but innocent. He watched as Sherlock gingerly took the plate from Madeline and made his way slow as a tightrope walker back into the kitchen. John gave Madeline a tight smile. "So, your Daddy, he's in law enforcement?"

"He's a detective inspector!" Madeline happily proclaimed. She hopped up and down and matched her sister's grin. "He's smart, Caroline! You shouldn't think him dull."

"Daddy works on homicides. That's when someone gets murdered. Sometimes he leaves his folders around and we look at them." Caroline scratched her nose before continuing. "MyMy gets mad when he does that and they yell at each other by whispering really hard. And one time Miss Molly was babysitting us and she had to go into work so she brought us with her and we got to look at the dead people for real. Not the gory ones, though, because she was afraid Madeline would have a bad dream. We just saw an old lady who died in her sleep."

"She looked like she was still sleeping," Madeline added. "But, you know, she wasn't." Madeline frowned, remembering it. "She looked very tired."

"Molly explained death is something no one should be afraid of and it's a natural process just like getting born is. She told us all about what she does, she finds out how they died and why and it's very important. Because even if someone's dead, it hurts to leave questions unanswered. No one likes that." She wiped a stray strand of blonde hair from her face and rested her cheek on the cushion on the back of John's chair. She looked far more innocent and even sweet at this angle, John thought, and it wasn't a false pose meant to manipulate, she was just genuinely awkward in that way children are, intellect and limbs not caught up with one another.

Pieces were slowly fitting together in John's mind. "Molly. You mean, Molly Hooper?"

"He knows her! He knows Molly, Madeline!"

"I wish you were the uncle," Madeline wistfully said. "You must be very nice if you know Molly."

"Even better than that," John said, suddenly grinning. "I have a good idea who your Daddy is, too." He turned to Sherlock who was seated at a chair in the kitchen. "Right, Sherlock?"

But Sherlock was now pale and scowling, his upper lip trembling as he muttered to himself, anger replacing fear. John couldn't understand it, and he chalked it up to Sherlock's strange phobia of twins. The two little girls now comfortable in their sitting room were just as he'd said, mirrors perfectly complimenting one another, where one stream of thought strayed the other would latch upon it, expanding it into clarity. A person, multiplied.

"You know who our Daddy is?" Madeline asked, her bright blue eyes shimmering with curiosity.

"He knows Molly, so he must." Caroline gave him an identical study. "Say his name."

John was about to oblige when the front door slammed and frantic steps made their way up the stairs to the flat. He turned to tell whatever client arrived in a panic that they would have to wait, but he was stopped short by a very unexpected visit from a breathless Mycroft Holmes.

"Sherlock!" Mycroft was saying as he entered the flat. "I need you to go over some CCTV footage, it's urgent, it involves two missing little girls and I know how you feel about twins, but..."

"MyMy!" the girls shouted in unison.

Woah.

What?

John watched Mycroft's reaction carefully. Ever since the events at Sherrinford he'd had a new understanding of the man, that there was significantly more persona than substance, that he never truly held power over anyone, least of all his little brother. And he watched now as the mask slipped, the relief that washed over the man's panicked face had him choke with emotion for an instant, only for it to be placed firmly back on. Mycroft glanced into the kitchen at his brother, his movements into the flat suddenly slow as though he'd just realized he'd walked into a hungry lion's cage.

"Caroline. Madeline." Mycroft spoke slowly, choosing each word very carefully. "What are you doing here?"

"He's our uncle," Madeline whispered, but she was looking at John for reassurance.

"We're in trouble Madeline," Caroline moaned. Her eyes watered as did her sister's in identical distress. "We just wanted to know. It was important. Some things don't need answers, but Madeline and I, we knew. This did."

"Are we grounded forever?" Madeline asked, and a thick tear fell from an ocean blue eye and down her pale cheek.

"Not forever," Mycroft said, and John could only watch him, how he trembled slightly where he stood, doing what he could to keep up the pretence of ice, only to watch Madeline wipe at her wet cheeks with the heel of her hand and for Caroline to do the same and it was then that Mycroft sighed, the hitch in it acting like a signal that had the two little girls running to him for comfort. He pulled them both into a tight embrace and kissed the top of their heads. He wouldn't meet John's shocked gaze.

"You must never disappear like that again," he said, firm. "I was so worried. I thought you were hurt...I thought..."

'I thought Eurus got you,' John heard in his head.

Madeline choked on a sob. "I'm sorry..."

"We weren't thinking," Caroline added.

"We just wanted to know."

"It felt important."

"But he doesn't like us. We made you scared for nothing, We're so sorry!"

They clung to Mycroft's side and wiped their tears on his expensive Westwood wool coat and the most shocking thing to John was that the man encouraged their embrace rather than peeling them off. The umbrella had been discarded in favour of holding the remorseful girls close in a genuine, parental hug.

John wanted to ask just where the hell was Mycroft Holmes, because he'd never met this man, he'd only known the one who glanced at Rosie in passing dismissal and never once offered any interest at all in her welfare. "He doesn't care about humans," Sherlock had said as a way to explain his brother's cold behaviour.

Lies. Mycroft Holmes was very much interested in these tiny humans, and from the protective way he had his arms around them, keeping them close, it was clear these girls had a profound significance in his life. Sherlock was still in the kitchen, smouldering, and John, unable to keep quiet in the face of all this tension, blurted out, "Just what the devil is going on?"

The front door slammed open and shut again and even heavier steps ran up to 221B. A breathless DI Greg Lestrade burst into the sitting room and before John could ask what was *he* doing here, the girls looked up and cried, in unison, "Daddy!"

John stood dumbfounded in the doorway of the flat, too stunned to speak.

"You devious little devils," Lestrade said. He was still breathless, as though he'd run full tilt to Baker Street from the NSY. He took a few moments to catch his breath, while the girls clutched close to Mycroft, huge, unhappy eyes and pitiful sad expressions pressed hard into quality black wool.

Lestrade, however, wasn't moved.

He shook his finger at Caroline. "Grounded!" He turned to Madeline next. "Grounded!"

He braced his shoulders as he looked down on them. "What were you thinking? Going on the Tube all on your own, where any number of rotten villains could get their hands on you! We were scared shitless when your teacher called me up asking if I could go round and pick up your homework assignment! We had no idea where you were! Fobbing off school, calling them up and lying to the receptionist, like a couple of seasoned truants!"

"Gregory, I think that's quite enough," Mycroft firmly said to him.

"You're joking," Gregory said, shifting his exasperation onto Mycroft. "The last I looked you were a bloody firm believer in consequences to actions and there's going to be some serious ones here!"

Mycroft closed his eyes against Lestrade's tirade. "They are frightened and remorseful and that is enough. Come along, girls, we'll go for a hot cocoa at Waterstones and then go home."

"Did that book on the history of surgery come in that I requested?" Madeline asked. She sniffed, and wiped her nose on Mycroft's pocket.

"I believe so."

"No!" Lestrade reiterated, stopping him. "No books! No hot cocoa! In fact, no TV for a week!"

Mycroft's face twisted and his mouth became a thin, pressed line. "You need not be so draconian. They've had an ordeal, Gregory."

"You always do this," Lestrade growled at him. "I'm always the bad guy, doling out the discipline while you wipe their tears and shuffle them off to buy ice cream. I warned you that your indulgence was going to rub off on them!"

But for all his bluster, Lestrade softened a little as he looked on the miserable little girls and despite his waning panic and residual anger he said, "Okay. Hot cocoa, that's fine. If the book's in, fine. But no TV for a week. I mean that."

Madeline cautiously left Mycroft's embrace and was scooped up into Lestrade's arms, the burly inspector giving her a sloppy wet kiss on her damp, red cheek. "I'm sorry my yelling scared you, moppet. I was scared too. You know that Daddy goes after Bad People and I thought one of them got you and Caroline and just the idea made me lose me head."

Caroline gave Lestrade a baleful grunt of apology. Her voice was muffled in Mycroft's coat. "I love you, Daddy."

"I love you too, moppet two," and he kissed Caroline's forehead, Madeline still perched on his hip and clutching tight around the inspector's neck. He stood close enough to Mycroft for their shoulders to touch. A look was exchanged between the two men that had many unspoken words dangling between them. Mycroft's stern expression melted when Lestrade leaned over and, ever so lightly, brushed the tip of his nose against the curve of Mycroft's long, pale neck.

"They're fine. They're safe." Lestrade hoisted Madeline further up his hip. Her small arms were wrapped tight around Lestrade's neck, a thick cascade of blonde curly hair draped over his shoulder, obscuring her face. Lestrade was still close to Mycroft, the tip of his nose brushing against Mycroft's ear this time.

"Breathe," he said.

Mycroft closed his eyes and let out a shuddering sigh.

"Come on," Lestrade said, his lips intimately close to Mycroft's ear as he whispered into it, just loud enough for John to overhear. "Let's go home."

John frowned, still not comprehending the strange exchange, his shock reverberating throughout his understanding with a circular conclusion that couldn't possibly be true.

Lestrade was 'Daddy'. Mycroft was 'MyMy'. Twin girls played with a severed head in his apartment. Sherlock was brooding in the kitchen. Lestrade was the parent of twin girls, he'd already figured on that due to the Molly connection, but Mycroft...Lestrade....Mycroft....

"Have you figured it out yet, John?" Sherlock's voice boomed across the sitting room.

"I...I think so...?"

"The slowness of your acuity often annoys me, but in this case I will make an exception. It's a hell of a thing to discover that all you've believed is a ruse, a carefully administered dribble of false information along with its lack that is manipulated to create a specific reality." Sherlock paced in front of the now closed door to the apartment and fixed Lestrade with a steady, icy glare. "To have such a play used against me by my brother is a drama I am long used to. But for you to be a part of it, Inspector Lestrade, that is quite unexpected." Sherlock gave Lestrade's frustrated expression a curious one of his own. "You fooled me for years. Well done, Inspector. I knew there was a reason you were the one I preferred out all others of your peers. Shrewd, emotionally intelligent with a sharp insight into what needs to be done to protect those you care for, these are virtues to be admired. Leave it to my brother, of course, to exploit them."

Mycroft rolled his eyes. "We are not having this conversation right now. Girls, Gregory, we're leaving..."

"SIT DOWN!"

Mycroft clearly wanted to protest, but there was a danger in Sherlock's tone that had Lestrade pulling the elder Holmes aside, towards the couch. They sat down and the girls were tucked between them in a protective barrier, Mycroft refusing to meet his brother's glare, while Lestrade confidently did, a strange gleam of challenge in the DI's dark eyes.

It was pure madness to say it out loud, but John couldn't stop himself. He stood in front of Mycroft, shaking his head.

"You're the wife."

He didn't deny it. John staggered back a little, the silence an admission. "You..." He tried to find his composure and discovered he couldn't. Sherlock was no help. The world famous consulting detective was now flopped into his usual throne, his thoughts drawn deeply inward. He seemed content to allow John the job of confrontation.

"You...The two of you are married." John blinked as years of understanding clipped into place in his mind. "But I thought you were divorced, Sherlock said..."

And then, as though seeing it for the first time, John stared at the ring on Mycroft's finger, a ring that, if he had been more observant he would have realized matched Gregory Lestrade's when he used to wear it. Even more telling was the tan line that still remained on Gregory's ring finger, one that never seemed to fade no matter how many years passed.

Conversations and pieces drifted into John's mind. In truth, he'd never paid much attention to what was going on in Lestrade's personal life, the flippant observations made by Sherlock more an embarrassing aside than anything revealing. But now they took on supreme significance, rolling upon a track of strange coincidence and the inevitable conclusions.

Lestrade, the first time he'd met him, had been in Sherlock's flat, doing a drug raid. On orders from Mycroft. He hadn't equated the fact the man was on the British Government's speed dial with any hint of the intimacy of their relationship, but hindsight offered amazing clicks into the puzzle. Mycroft could have called on any number of his agents to go over Sherlock's apartment with far less intrusive flair. But he'd called on Greg, and it was clearly a common occurrence.

It was a favour, the kind one would only trust to family.

Nicotine patches, holding up his bargain to Sherlock that he was quitting smoking. A pact. An acquaintance didn't get that involved, there was a level of care on Lestrade's part that went beyond being a DI following the orders of a fussy 'lower level civil servant'.

Rothman's. He smoked the same brand as Lestrade.

There were a myriad other hints. The way Lestrade had looked at Sherlock when he was told his wife was cheating on him, surprised but uncomfortable with the observation rather than angry. The pointed references to relationships that were doomed from the start. Lestrade, taking the observations in stride until they lost their impact, only finding consternation with that last one, when Sherlock had told him she 'wasn't the one'.

"I don't do everything your brother says." In Baskerville, during the H.O.U.N.D.S case.

John felt a complete fool. He stared at the figures on the couch, the years of another drama playing out in secret, well away from Sherlock's awareness for though he was brilliant he was also hyper focused, putting gaps in his perception if the facts didn't involve The Work. The things that Sherlock thought didn't matter he summarily deleted them.

He deleted a whole sister. A whole, tragic history, obliterated. Sherlock was perfectly capable of blocking uncomfortable truths out.

The tan line was still visible on Lestrade's ring finger. A pale white band against sun damaged skin.

He wore his ring when he wasn't around Sherlock.

A deliberate ruse. Just like the carefully applied lipstick on his collar, to suggest he'd been out on a date, the occasional hair planted on his jacket to put Sherlock well off the scent. A spritz of perfume, different every time, an olfactory lie. Mycroft's touches, for he was well aware what his brother would look for and he ensured the clues were obvious.

This was the first time, John realized, that he'd ever seen Mycroft and Lestrade in close proximity to one another. He'd never thought of it before, the fact the men had never crossed paths during their cases, which now felt like a determined sort of absence.

Mycroft hadn't attended John's wedding. He'd put Gregory Lestrade in his place. And Greg had made sure everyone knew he was 'working it out' with the ex, who remained as invisible as all his other love interests. An ex who was a ready excuse against any wedding induced thoughts of romance in the guests attending the reception. When Sholto was nearly murdered and the photographer arrested, Lestrade looked damned near relieved to have a ready escape.

Molly Hooper sat at his table.

Molly Hooper knew everything. Damn, he couldn't doubt how good at this she could be, she'd aided Sherlock in his fake death, after all. And Eurus, being the evil witch she was, she'd figured that Molly was special but she still didn't have a clue by just how much.

Mycroft Holmes, guarded, cold, secretive and fond of hiding beneath facades, he'd kept Eurus from Sherlock and now, it seemed, he'd kept an entire extended family from him, too.

"My brother has a secret family," Sherlock stated. "I should have known, he's always been prone to melodrama and is addicted to bad film noir. Secrets, lies and shadows. Caroline, Madeline, you are correct, I am your Uncle Sherlock, and it's a pleasure to meet you. Pity that you're twins, but that's not your fault, though I have to wonder if your adoption was due to my brother's understanding of my phobia. All the more reason to keep my subconscious from poking into places he doesn't want me to intrude."

"Don't be ridiculous," Mycroft snapped, deeply offended. "Our decision to have children had nothing to do with you."

"I must agree there," Sherlock continued. "The need to have an heir to carry on the Holmes name must have weighed heavily on you, brother mine, and the years haven't been kind to you. You never did get rid of that pudge around the middle, that bit of softness you constantly deny you own. Really, Lestrade, you've latched a decade to this man and followed along with his silly play. You can do better."

John held his breath. "Sherlock..."

"I mean, fake girlfriends are one thing, but a whole hidden family, I'm really quite impressed. Of course, you must factor in my realization that one of your paramours being my brother was too foul a thought to contemplate and thus I obliterated it. I wonder which one it was? Was it the cheating wife? You were buying fitness equipment at the time, as I recall, Mycroft, so perhaps that part of my deduction was true."

"No," John said, and Sherlock frowned, his attention now riveted on his friend. John cleared his throat and tried not to think of the two little girls sandwiched between their parents and the vastness of what he had to reveal to Sherlock, the hurt of it set to level all of Baker Street in no way a bomb ever could.

"Sherlock, they have been together a lot longer than ten years."

Sherlock opened his mouth. Closed it. Frowned. Frowned deeper. His forehead now furrowed into such deep creases it was giving John a headache to look at him.

"Twenty-one years, in fact," Mycroft said, and the bottom fell out of John's stomach.

Sherlock worked his jaw, his mood murderous. "Interesting." He pursed his lips and glanced at Lestrade, who unlike Mycroft was not about to back down from Sherlock's glower. "Happy years, I take it."

"Very happy," Lestrade humourlessly assured him.

"I am impressed, Greg." Sherlock shook his head, his sneer an answer in and of itself. "You really got me."

"You think I enjoyed this?" Greg stood up from the couch and stood in front of Sherlock, his strong hands on his hips as he boldly confronted him. "I couldn't let you in, it was too damned dangerous. You got a taste of it in Sherrinford and now you got the nerve to sit there and be sanctimonious, playing the moral card with either of us? You bloody wanker!"

"You hid an entire family, you shut me out!" Sherlock stood up from his chair, now nose to nose with Lestrade who definitely wasn't backing down now. "You had no right!"

"It must be damn nice being able to look down at everyone from that high horse. We can talk about history all afternoon if you like. I'm right a bloody expert on it. How about all those times you spent in crack dens, all the overdoses, the needles and your raging madness, your rather disturbing 'deletion', all of that's wiped clean, is it?" Greg shoved his way closer, forcing Sherlock to take a misstep and fall back into his chair with Greg looming over him. "And whistling over it all in the background, the wicked witch of the east. You couldn't be trusted, Sherlock. You were a goddamned drug addict and I had to protect him!"

Tension was wired tight through 221B, the air stale with it. Madeline took a puff from her inhaler, the hiss of it the only sound in the entire house.

"It was your idea," Sherlock said at length. He chewed his bottom lip, the hurt visible, openly smarting. "Mycroft followed your lead."

"I'm not proud of it, if that's what you think. But I'd do it again, because that's what you do for people you love, Sherlock, you keep them from harm's way. You don't throw them out in front of your own personal tornado and hope they survive it. You give them shelter. You give them a place that's safe, and that's exactly what I did and what I've been doing for twenty-one years."

Sherlock's barbs were quick. "And then twenty-one years later your work is unravelled by two eight year old girls."

Lestrade crossed his arms over his chest, undaunted. "Yeah, well they're my girls, aren't they?"

Sherlock's fingertips dug into the arms of his leather chair, clawed hands that helplessly tried to cling to a history he couldn't fathom. John wondered if Sherlock was thinking what he was, if there was anything in their lives that had any tangible thread of genuine truth to it. Regardless of what Lestrade believed, they were always in danger. Even Rosie had been tainted by Mary's past. It had crawled its way out and claimed her mother and there was still the malingering concern that woke John up at night that of all of them it would be Rosie who would suffer from Mary's hidden world the most. That enemies were still lying in wait, looking to exact revenge on her legacy.

They hadn't said one word but Sherlock understood John's sentiments perfectly.

"Get out," Sherlock said to Lestrade.

"Thanks for that, saves me the trouble of telling you we're leaving."

But Sherlock wasn't one to let a moment slip without adding his own imprint upon it and as Mycroft gathered his girls together to leave, Sherlock was quick to give them an offer their curious little minds couldn't refuse. "It was a pleasure to meet you both, Caroline and Madeline! Do come back to 221B, Baker Street any time you wish! You see, in this house, my door is always open to family!"

Mycroft lingered as though he was about to interject, but Lestrade bid him to take the girls and go downstairs to where his car was waiting. "I'll catch up," Lestrade said.

He didn't speak until the girls were well out of the building. "You need to stop visiting her."

"I thought I was clear, I told you to get out."

"I deal with people like her every day, Sherlock, whatever epiphany it is you think she's had, it's one you're projecting onto her. It's dangerous, what you're doing, and I'm telling you flat out, mate, you cause any kind of trouble for my family as a result and you'll be regretting it."

"The demand that you get out of my flat still stands, Inspector Lestrade."

Lestrade made a move to step closer to Sherlock and John blocked him. "He's made himself pretty clear, inspector."

Lestrade chewed the inside of his cheek and headed for the door. He paused in its frame. "This place stinks like a bog. Makes you wonder why anyone would fix it. If it were up to me, the whole place would be condemned." He tapped his fingers on the door frame and gave Sherlock's furious glare a knowing nod. "See you around."


	2. oasis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft Holmes has a home life. Greg is determined that he keep it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has been giving kudos and all of your wonderful comments! This has been an idea festering in my wee brain since January and it feels really good to get it out, so chances are this will be a fairly regularly updated fic! Hope you enjoy it!

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN TWO STRAIGHT LINES  
chapter two

They swung through the roundabout at Piccadilly, his girls tucked into the back seat, quietly watching the afternoon London traffic as it passed them by. Every now and then Caroline would whisper a number like 'one-hundred and one' with Madeline answering 'one hundred and twenty'. He watched them through the rear view mirror, his precious daughters studies in beauty and brains in duplicate and the sick feeling welling in his stomach rose again. They could have been hurt by this stunt. It was bad enough that Sherlock knew, but now with that bitch in Sherrinford playing her violin and Sherlock along with it the danger had never felt closer.

Mycroft sat in the passenger seat beside him, pensive, his shoulders hunched forward in a subconscious, protective pose that was going to leave his back aching when he tried to sleep in bed that night. Lestrade grabbed his shoulder and massaged it, his hand creeping further along until he was kneading knots out of Mycroft's neck with firm strokes of his thumb. "I'm going to fire her."

Mycroft let out a groan. "You can't do that, Gregory."

"I can and I will. She was supposed to make sure they got in the car and she didn't do it, she slept in like she always does, or was perched in that damn wicker chair on the back porch with her damned cigarette, either way she didn't do what she was supposed to. This wouldn't have happened if she'd been keeping an eye on them, she's bloody fired!"

Mycroft rolled his head to the side towards Lestrade, his cheek pressed against the pale grey leather headrest. "You can't fire your mother."

"Just watch me."

"She's seventy-three years old, has had cancer twice, she lives on wine and cigarettes, is dearly loved by her granddaughters and you are not firing her."

"I'm putting her on a bloody plane and shipping her off to Helene's," Greg gruffly continued. He made a hard left down the Mall towards Belgravia, only to veer right and bring the car around a strip of government buildings, one which had the Diogenes tucked into a discreet corner. He noticed the tiny longing Mycroft gave the building but passed it without comment. There was no time today for that kind of meditation. "She can spend the rest of her days wrapped in silk in a suburb outside of Paris contemplating sunshine, merlot and cigarillos. We won't have to hear any more bitching about the damp."

"Helene and Celeste do not get along. You know as well as I that your sister can't spend ten minutes with your mother without it turning into a screaming match." Mycroft closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, a familiar sight these days. "Besides, your mother is too frail to handle those hooligans your sister calls children. It's bad enough they spent August with us, if you ship Celeste to her she'll be using every excuse in her power to come back anyway and she'll be bringing Helene's brood with her as punishment."

Lestrade put both hands back on the steering wheel and drummed it with the tips of his fingers in nervous agitation. Mycroft was right, he always bloody was, but he didn't want to concede defeat just yet. Lestrade glanced over at him, taking in the tired pallor of his skin, the flush of panic still lingering in red blotches on his throat. Dark circles under his eyes gave him a sickly look, one that Lestrade could easily empathize with. He wondered if Sherlock was sleeping easy these days because Mycroft sure as hell still wasn't. He'd lost count of the night terrors that had woken him up since Eurus's cruelty, Mycroft leaping out of bed and shouting into the darkness of their room, convinced he was covered in Sherlock's blood. Coaxing him back to bed sometimes took over an hour.

Mycroft started taking sleeping pills so he wouldn't wake the girls. They'd been frightened by his midnight outbursts. The pills made him tired in the day, too, to the point that his meditative time at the Diogenes turned into prolonged napping sessions. Lestrade was getting at least three calls a week from the front desk concierge to come and collect an 'indisposed' Mycroft whose snores were disturbing the other guests.

Under Lady Smallwood's insistence Mycroft was shelved into a forced vacation for the entire summer. The girls were thrilled to have him home, as was Celeste, but Lestrade had noted the lack of real rest, the constant flinching whenever the TV was turned on and the hunched way Mycroft walked past and avoided dark rooms, flicking lights on throughout the house the second dusk approached.

He insisted on making love with the lamp by their bedside on, his hands clinging to Lestrade as though he was convinced the man would disappear without his touch. Lestrade had to get used to sleeping in half light. At home he clung to Lestrade, in bed and out of it, constantly seeking a reassuring kiss and cuddle, a welcome affection if it hadn't been so tainted with fearful need.

He brought the navy BMW down a hidden driveway that curled around the back end of an austere government issued building, the place Sherlock believed was Mycroft's home. It was actually an empty Victorian relic, a former university building that now housed random museum pieces, damaged historical remnants that weren't showpiece worthy. The night Sherlock had confronted him about Eurus, Mycroft had spent the night there to get backlogged paperwork done--and to sneak a viewing of his favourite film noir titles on celluloid. A collector had dropped them off for review by the National Gallery the night before, and since no one else shared Mycroft's enthusiasm for shadowed black and white sets, snappy dialogue and silk pantsuits, he'd decided to give himself a rare treat.

Which was, as usual, ruined by his brother and his lackeys. Went at him with clowns of all things. Rattled poor Mycroft for days.

He pulled up to the small house that was significantly demure compared to the far more expensive examples on this particular, secretive street. Two blocks away, on the main street just before Belgravia, Lestrade's faux flat was set up above a fast food restaurant, the interior infused with sad bachelorhood, complete with empty pizza boxes and rumpled bedding that hadn't been changed in years. Mycroft had been fiendishly thorough, anticipating every move his brother would possibly make and keeping at least a half a step in front of him. Somehow, in between all that, he held countries together.

It's no wonder the poor sod was tired.

Lestrade put the car in park in the driveway and lightly ran the back of his knuckles along the length of Mycroft's cheek. His eyes fluttered open, grey confusion momentarily reigning until Lestrade was fully in focus. The rear doors slammed shut and Mycroft let out an involuntary flinch. The girls were already in the house before Lestrade got the key out of the ignition.

Mycroft sighed beneath the gentle caress of Lestrade's knuckles petting his cheek.

"Stop worrying," Lestrade said. "We're going to be fine."

"You don't know that."

"Yes," Lestrade insisted. "I do. And frankly, I'm pleased as punch I don't have to make up girlfriends any more. Do you think Sherlock ever noticed some of them were based on John's old conquests?"

"No," Mycroft replied, giving Lestrade a half smile. "That was especially rotten of you."

Lestrade took off his seat belt and leaned over Mycroft, nipping at his nose before giving him a soft kiss on his lips. "Right to the core, that's me."

Mycroft grinned. "Never."

The temptation was too great, his palm cupping Mycroft's chin as he pulled him into a deeper kiss. It was silly, really, they were both too old to be making out in a car parked in a driveway, but desperate measures and all. Lestrade needed Mycroft to know he hadn't done anything wrong, that whatever fallout happened from this he was going to take care of it. Mycroft had bigger things to think about, like that meeting with the Prime Minister coming up on Friday that had something to do with Russia, polar ice caps and Syria, all of it pretty dire from the way he'd paced a hole in the carpet in their bedroom, one phone call after another switching from Russian to English and cursing in both. He'd had a nice summer vacation and now Lady Smallwood was dunking him headfirst into an ice bath of diplomatic shock.

He could feel the taut muscles lining Mycroft's neck and shoulders, his hands roaming over the tight connection of muscle and bone to end cradling his head within them as his kisses became breathless. Lestrade broke free, very much liking the disappointed sigh that left Mycroft's lips, their foreheads touching.

"Snogging in a parked car in a driveway is good and all but you're getting me randy enough to toss you in the back seat for a tumble."

Mycroft smiled. "Impractical. As I recall, our youthful experiences in car parks involved a lot of bruised elbows and considerably complex yoga poses. I don't think either of our backs could withstand those kinds of callisthenics these days."

"The girls are determined to go to Waterstones after lunch. Do you want to come with us or do you want to stay home? Might be a good idea for you to go upstairs to bed and settle your nerves a little."

Mycroft was having none of that. "I'm coming with you! They aren't the only ones who like hot cocoa, you know."

Twenty-one years and the man still didn't know what he did to him, the way his smile nipped at Lestrade's heart, sending ripples of happiness through his body and soul. He knew Mycroft's peers and even his own family never looked at him in terms of 'handsome', he gave the world a face and posture that was too severe for such a description. Hooked nose, dark auburn hair that had always been receding from a sloped forehead, cheekbones that alternated between soft and sharp depending on the angle one looked at him, skin the colour of soy milk. He dressed in carefully applied expensive suits, complete with old fashioned waistcoats that gave him an aura of repressed stuffiness usually found in the forgotten basements of university libraries. Lestrade took all that in and knew he was gorgeous. He couldn't understand how it was that other people never saw it, the simmering warmth that was there beneath the surface of a cold veneer, a hidden hot spring. Lestrade was well aware that most people never delved further than the surface of what was given to them, in that he agreed wholeheartedly with Sherlock. Truly understanding another person takes time and, in Mycroft's case, very tender, slow unravelling lest he be spooked and shut down. Most people couldn't be bothered with the patience that kind of effort involved. But Lestrade was that rare breed made of the stuff.

He kissed the bridge of Mycroft's long nose and leaned back. "I love you."

Twenty-one years, and those grey eyes still sparked with joyful surprise at that phrase, cheeks reddening in a disarming blush.

"Come on," Lestrade said, opening the driver's side door. "Let's get in there before the girls fill up on a tub of ice cream instead of a sandwich."

Their little house was as much a contrast to the current wealth of their neighbourhood as one could find, a leftover relic built at some point in the early 1930's well before the area had become gentrified. It had survived the Blitz and for this alone Mycroft found its perseverance charming and had been delighted to be invited into it all those years ago. The massive estate homes that flanked it were filled with government officials and upper class business CEOs who looked at the little house in their midst as an odd eyesore, a feeling exacerbated when Helene and her brood visited, curses in French and screaming children echoing across the back green space. There had been numerous complaints about the sad state of the house, with its dirty windows and a front door covered in crayon and scuff marks, but the facts were it was structurally sound and though it was outwardly ugly it was hardly a shack.

Plum barked and snorted in joy as Lestrade entered the house, Mycroft following close behind him. The five year old pittie rolled on his back, tongue lolling comically out of the side of his mouth as he pushed a pile of shoes out of the way with his massive, wide head, not allowing them entrance without a quick belly rub first. Lestrade dove down and happily obliged, the dog's tail whipping against the wall before he gave a quick bark and took off on clumsy fat feet into the kitchen where the girls were already rummaging through the fridge.

The dog had come to them as a puppy, after one of Lestrade's drug raids that had also resulted in animal control seizing a half dozen dogs used for illegal dog fights. Plum had been found in a duffel bag, ready to be used as cruel bait to be torn apart by the fighting dogs because he didn't have any meanness in him. How the son of a bitch dealer knew a puppy was soft at only a few weeks old was a mystery Lestrade couldn't be bothered to solve. Lestrade fell in love with the big puppy smile he earned when he'd unzipped the bag, and the big sloppy purple-pink tongue licked his fingers and that was that.

Mycroft had no clue what to do with a dog and he'd been wary of Plum at first. He'd never had pets as a child. Eurus had prevented that when she used their father's razor to cut open a neighbour's cat.

"There's so many shoes in this doorway you'd think a dozen people lived here." Mycroft pushed the mess out of the way with his heel before sliding out of his Italian leather shoes and carefully hanging up his Westwood coat in a part of the closet sectioned off with heavy plastic. It was a trick Greg had suggested and that worked like a charm in keeping off trace evidence. On those days Mycroft didn't have time to check his suit for residual dog hairs and the greasy hands of children, clean overcoats were an effective barrier against Sherlock's powers of deduction. Greg tossed his own overcoat over the back of a heavily cushioned couch where it joined a sweater and a pair of pink socks. "Maman?" Greg shouted towards the kitchen. "Etes-tu ici?"

There was no answer, but he knew she was there, the scent of her quality cigarillos drifting through the back of the house. He found her on the glass enclosed back porch, sitting in her wicker throne, thin, brown cigarillo in hand, an empty stemmed glass on a matching wicker side table at her elbow.

She paused mid-smoke and looked past Greg and into the kitchen, where Mycroft was now busy preparing lunch for the girls. Cheese sandwiches on whole wheat, a side of green salad, pop and a candy bar. Not entirely healthy, but the effort was made and Greg bit back on his smile.

His mother held up her glass. "Aha, mes petite filles! Caroline, mon cheri, un autre tasse du vin, s'il vous plait!"

"Maman," Greg said, shoulders back, resolve in place. "I need to talk to you. We had a problem today."

"Un probleme? Tu avais toutes les problemes mon cher, ton chien *vomited* dans la bain *again*." Her face abruptly changed from stern harpy to warm, delighted matron as Mycroft stepped out of the dining and into the glass enclosed porch. "Mycroft! You are home early! Assaiyez-vous, avec moi, my precious son-in-law!"

Celeste Lestrade is not always a charming woman, Greg knows, but her wholehearted adoption of Mycroft had been unexpected. Now in her mid seventies, she was a rail thin powerhouse of judgement wrapped in expensive silks, her joi de vivre consisting of red wine, cigarillos and a plethora of doting fancy men, one for every day of the week. In her prime she had been a stunning beauty and had graced the covers of Vogue for a short lived modelling career, which she gave up when she married Greg's father, a lieutenant of La Sûreté Nationale in France. Lieutenant Antoine Lestrade had died on duty when Greg was only five. He'd read the newspaper clippings his mother kept in a faded scrapbook, the pages held together with frayed silk ribbons. Lieutenant Antoine Lestrade, 35, had dove into a quarry in an attempt to save a drowning boy. The quarry was connected to the ocean via underground tunnels and the tide was pulling out, creating hidden, strong undertows that could easily pull a man to his death. Antoine Lestrade perished along with the boy he was trying to save.

His sister Helene was only months old. She didn't remember him at all, while Greg himself only had vague impressions of a man with a loud laugh and strong, calloused hands, tanned on the back. His father had been a handsome man, and Greg had taken on a lot of his features, his rugged muscular build and large, soft brown eyes, his mischievous smirk and thick salt and pepper hair. His mother often remarked that there were many times she'd looked at him and thought his father's ghost had come to visit her. "No matter how many fools I take to my bed that is the only one I miss," she once told him. She was halfway through a dark bottle of cabernet-merlot when she'd told him that. He'd been seeing Mycroft for a year. Greg took her words as both a blessing and a warning.

Caroline brought her a fresh glass of wine which Celeste gently plucked from her granddaughter's fingers. "Merci, mon cheri." She was still a beautiful woman, with that kind of ageless, maddening, romantic grace that was halfway between Nora Desmond and Eartha Kitt.

"The girls played hooky from school today," Greg said to her. "They went on the Underground all on their own and went to Baker Street and broke into an apartment. You'd better be giving me wide eyes, Maman, you know which one. I'm not saying it's your fault, but just keep in mind, you got to watch them. You should have made sure they got in the car with their friend Jenny's mum for the school run."

Celeste shrugged and took a sip of her wine. "It is nothing you and your sister didn't pull at that age. You did it all the time, je reviens, and the saucy mouth you would give me when I pulled you home by the ear. Always at the stupid arcade, stealing quarters and making amis avec those bad kids, the ones with the drugs. Ecoutez-moi, Mycroft, he was a little terror this one, going his own path, sure, he was smart enough not to follow and do the drugs like those bad boys, but he was there, always with half an eye on what they were doing. And Helene! Do not get me started! The fights we would have and we are still having them!"

Greg was already losing his patience. "Maman, Caroline and Madeline are only eight years old, they aren't teenagers, they aren't going to be going to arcades hanging out with drug addicts and they aren't going to be sexing up neighbourhood roughs and getting in fights with their girlfriends and frankly, if they do, I'd kind of like a heads up about it, so can you keep a bloody better eye on them? Please?"

Celeste let out a plume of smoke, annoyed. She cast a glance into the house at the two girls still eating their sandwiches, the candy bar wrappers in the middle of the table, the pop already gone. The salad was untouched. "Mycroft, mon cher, I take it you looked at your little cameras to find them, and you did, non?"

Mycroft shifted uncomfortably in the cushion perched on the wicker couch beside her. "Oui, Maman, mais..."

Long, slender fingers picked up her wine glass. "Then they weren't lost, they were simply misplaced. Where did you lose sight of them?"

Mycroft frowned. He dug into his side pocket and took out a pack of Rothman's, a cigarette slid between his thin lips. Greg reached into his pocket for a lighter and lit it for him. He thought about joining them, the temptation was strong, but he was trying to cut back. The stress of the morning had him sucking back four in a row before he'd arrived at Baker Street.

"We lost our visual trail after Piccadilly Station. We were able to determine their possible destination solely by the timing and price of the ticket sold to them."

Celeste was languid in her wicker chair, her black and gold silk robe cascading around her tiny frame like spilled ink flecked with filigree. "Then you know where to put more cameras," she purred.

"Hm, you have a point," Mycroft mused.

Greg crinkled his face at this and snatched Mycroft's smoke from him, sucking back two relieving puffs before speaking. "She does not! It's not up to bloody cameras to watch what they're up to! The point is they lied to get out of school and snuck over to a place they were well aware had dangers, and no, Mycroft, before you even ask I have no idea where they got their information, it's not like there's a bloody billboard!"

"Actually, mon cher, there is," Celeste took another long sip of her wine and smacked her lips appreciatively. "A big one, up by the Tesco. 'Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective' and a phone number. I don't know if they have seen it. Maybe. But I do know you are careless with your things, and sometimes you leave your laptop open and that John Watson blog is on it. They are good readers, they are not babies, they can piece together random information, they see things maybe even that one on Baker Street doesn't. They are very good at this."

"They can be damned geniuses at it, they're still grounded."

Celeste raised a brow at her son. "The only secrets we can keep are the ones our own bodies keep from ourselves. They know him now." She cocked her head and studied Mycroft. "He knows of both of you and them. One big, happy family, oui?"

"I wouldn't go that far," Mycroft said, taking the remains of his cigarette back from Greg. "He kicked us out of his flat."

"He will be back again," Celeste said, more dire prophecy than hope. "Blood is a powerful medium, Mycroft. You do care for your brother, and he has shaken off the chemical lies he told himself. There is room for the truth, now. You must be brave and allow it." She closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of her wicker chair. "Have you told your mother about them yet, my precious son-in-law?"

Mycroft tensed. "No."

"Don't worry," she said, her eyes still closed, the hem of her black silk dressing gown pooled around her bare feet. "He will."

***  
"MyMy?"

He was at the kitchen table, his usual spot when going over important documents, which were now spread all over the oak surface. He'd been going over the wording of several disarmament agreements, ensuring there weren't any loopholes for opportunistic warlords to jump through and exploit when it came to the bartering for arms. Russia, as usual, was being stubborn about its price points, offering deep deals to Turkey and Syria while undercutting the Ukraine. But it was African nations that took the bulk orders, gun traders all too eager to keep civil unrest a constant threat. It made it all the easier to exploit their resources.

This dining room table had seen all manner of murder, international carnage and domestic, Mycroft thought. Greg used it to go over homicide cases, the images laid out in front of him easier to go over than on a computer screen. Paper and ink made the information more solid, he'd claimed. It also made his curious girls experts in ligature marks by the time they were six. Greg often fell asleep over the crime scene photos and police reports, their thoughtful, rather sneaky charges taking over where their father's exhaustion took off.

Greg wasn't the only casualty. Mycroft had to hand in Papau New Guinea's new, officially sanctioned constitution with its surface littered with images of himself and Greg holding hands, along with the dog and the two girls and Grandmere and her glass of wine, all expertly drawn in colourful crayons.

A new official version of the constitution was, of course, silently drafted to replace it.

The scribbles on Greg's homicide files, however, were still a source of rowdy laughter at NYS holiday functions, though he'd been quick to label the blame on his sister's kids. The Superintendent had even suggested Greg should hire his 'nieces' as composite illustrators. "They got the hair right, see?" Sally had said, pointing at the black and grey crayon lines jutting out of the top of his circular head.

Mycroft supposed Greg's cronies at NSY were going to be furious they were left out of his life to this extent, especially DI Sally Donovan. As for Lady Smallwood and some of his own operatives, perhaps they were already aware and had discreetly approved his measures to protect his family. Lady Smallwood had been open about her own and look how well that turned out. Blackmail from Magnussen and the proof his brother had the potential after all to become a killer.

He waved Madeline over and she crawled up into his lap, her head resting on his shoulder. He kissed her forehead. "Something wrong, mon choux?"

She wriggled until she was perfectly tucked on her side and in his arms at a comfortable angle. "That man we met today...He's related to us. He's your brother." She sniffed and Mycroft frowned. He hoped she wasn't getting a cold, her asthma didn't do well with them. "He had a head in his fridge. On a flowered plate."

"That sounds like Sherlock," Mycroft said, sighing deeply. "Did that scare you?"

"Not at all. I suppose it should have, but Caroline and I both asked it if it had been murdered and it said it hadn't been. It just drank a lot and passed out and drowned in a barrel. A natural sort of death, not scary, just sad. MyMy..." She looked up at her father, large blue eyes wide with hope. "Did he mean it when he said we could visit him any time? Because we'd like to see him again, even if he is weird and mean. The only family we have is on Daddy's side, and we don't know any that you have and that's not right, because a lot of our friends at school, they have two grans and loads of Aunties and Uncles and cousins from both parents, even if the parents don't live with each other any more. That little snot Mindy, the one who lives two doors down from us in that big fat house with the big fat car and the big fat chauffeur, she said it's on account you're stranged, and I kicked her in the shin and gave her what for, because there's nothing strange about you at all." She tucked her head into the crook of Mycroft's neck, soft curls a pillow against his skin. "You're going to get an angry letter about that. I did kick her shin hard enough to make her cry. Her mum was pretty mad."

Mycroft nestled his nose into her thick curls, breathing in the scent of jasmine shampoo. She chewed her thumbnail, chipped pink sparkly nail polish clinging to its centre in a little blob. "I'm not sure, Madeline. You and Caroline are very lucky to have the people you already have in your life. My brother has had...problems. It's very complicated, but what I can tell you is that I never did this out of spite but solely for our protection." He gave a dry kiss to her scalp. "Especially yours and your sister's."

"Do you care about your brother like how I care about Caroline?"

Mycroft frowned into her curls. "I'm not sure. You and Caroline are very special, you have so much in common and you are very best friends and have been since from the time you looked like little tadpoles in the same pond. You understand one another perfectly. Sherlock and I...He will always see me as his enemy, no matter what truce we occasionally forge."  
  
Their conversation was cut short by Greg's march into the kitchen, Caroline dancing behind him, making requests for dinner that increasingly centred around cake. "Dunno what you lot are thinking, but I got a right craving for duck a l'orange. We still got those tangerines in the crisper?" Greg pulled out a bottle of red wine along with several pots and pans. "Roasted potatoes, green beans, batarde. Sounds like a proper feast to me! Go on Caroline, get the braising pan on there, and drizzle it up with the olive oil like I showed you."

Evening had descended, and Mycroft watched, transfixed, as Greg Lestrade tidied the messy counter, tossing the four empty hot chocolate paper cups from Waterstones in the trash and propping Madeline's 'The History Of Gruesome Surgeries 1700-Present' on a shelf above the counter that held tattered cookbooks. Madeline slowly slithered out of Mycroft's grasp to join her sister and father in the kitchen, Madeline dutifully peeling potatoes over the sink while Caroline, ever the braver one, was given chopped onions and garlic to sweat in the braising pan.

The food smelled delicious already, for Greg was an expert cook, unafraid of fat and grease and there was never a vegetable he didn't know how to coax into a burst of rich flavours. During their first years together his wonderful cooking had put a few pounds on Mycroft, especially that soft middle Sherlock couldn't stop nagging him about, and though he still struggled to keep the weight off it was a losing battle against the joys of authentic French cooking.

"No gravy for me, Gregory, I'm still on that diet," Mycroft reminded him. "And no butter on the potatoes."

"You don't need to be on a diet, you're bloody gorgeous. There, that's the duck stuffed. Those tangerines will make one hell of a nice jus. Stand back, girls, a bit of crisping is going on." The duck was plopped into the pan and a harsh sizzle erupted through the kitchen. Greg seasoned the duck with salt and pepper, a long pair of tongs turning it to ensure it was properly seared.

International disarmament and its fallout would have to wait. Mycroft gathered up his papers and locked his laptop, the entire mess of the world shoved into a small briefcase and kicked into a corner of the dining room beside a dying spider plant. He knew better than to go into the kitchen while Greg and the girls were playing with food, mouthwatering offerings of creams and fats a constant gauntlet. He got to work on his own routine, setting the table for five, making sure that Celeste had a small plate, as her appetite had been poor since her last fight with liver cancer.

He watched his family carefully as he laid out the polished spoons, forks and knives alongside pretty white ceramic plates. Greg was singing a Buju Banton song, the bawdier lyrics switched out for a rhyme about ducks and oranges. Madeline giggled and dropped a potato on the floor and Plum, ever the opportunist, snatched it up and ran off with it. The girls were suddenly in full pursuit, the dog tossing the mangled potato in the air and then snatching it back when they got close. This went on until Greg, annoyed with the slobber, ordered Plum to drop it as he was getting soggy potato bits all over the living room and kitchen.

This was his family. He thought about things like this when meetings droned on for what seemed like days, when his mother called and he had to endure her endless prattle about Sherlock's latest accomplishments and was he all right? Shouldn't Mycroft be checking up on him more? And he would replace her recriminations of how she couldn't rely on him, that he was childish and dull with images like the one now happening in his kitchen and with this in the forefront of his mind he was capable of enduring anything.

His perfect, wonderful oasis.

Greg caught him watching and his improvised reggae song about ducks and oranges faltered, the braising pan taken off the burner. He marched to where Mycroft stood, shocked worry marring his handsome features. He reached across the table, his flour stained hands leaving crumbs on the wood and smearing Mycroft's cheek.

"What's all this?"

Mycroft frowned, shaking his head a little. He raised his own hand to his cheek, shocked to discover it was wet. Had he been crying? He didn't even realize...

Greg moved to the where he was standing on the other side of the table, brown eyes wide with concern. He pulled Mycroft into a tight embrace, floured hands staining his waistcoat. He held tight as Mycroft's shoulders buckled, gasps and tears impossible to keep under control.

Greg's hand was on the back of his head, soothing him the way he would an infant and Mycroft certainly felt just as helpless.

"Look at me."

Greg framed Mycroft's face in his hands, forcing him to obey. He felt crumpled and weak.

Dark brown eyes, determined and unwavering met him. "She's not going to get us. This isn't the end of anything. He's still a shit, but Sherlock's not as bad as he was before, and we always knew this day was coming. We're not going to let her ruin this, or us, do you get me? Nod, damn you."

Mycroft nodded.

Greg let out a long breath. "Right. We are prepared and we're going to be fine. So take a deep breath, fix yourself up and finish up, then. I've made a mess of you with my doughy hands."

Within a couple of hours, and a shed of a waistcoat, dinner was ready, the duck's flesh still holding a blush of red, the ideal way to serve it in Gregory Lestrade's view, with freshly baked batarde to soak up the gravy. Celeste was happy to have a glass of wine and a very small portion of duck and potatoes, enough to feed a flea, while Gregory poured ample wine for himself and Mycroft, loading up everyone else's plate and ignoring Mycroft's request for no gravy and naturally there was cranberry juice for the girls in their pink plastic wine glasses, just so they could be fancy too.

Celeste picked at a potato, but Mycroft noted that she didn't eat it. "Helene called," she announced to Greg. "She's fighting with that man of hers again and saying she is going to leave, finalement. Again. I do not understand this what she is doing, Gregory. She's not stupid, she knows better, she knows what a nice man looks like but she has to make sure she picks every single one from the garbage. This one, no job, on parole, a big loser, and now she's leaving him, and not kicking him out? It's her apartment! And with all those kids."

"She's not coming here," Greg said, firm. "We had enough of her and those brats all of August. Pierre and Gaston have a serious case of the stupids for kids their age."

"This is not a nice thing to say about children, mon cher," Celeste warned him.

"Can't deny what's true, Maman. They put damp firewood in the dryer so they could dry it out enough to use for a bonfire in the backyard, one they did not have permission for, by the way. They broke the damn dryer and half the girl's summer clothes got full of sap!"

Celeste sipped at her wine. "I told her you would think about it but not to get her hopes up. She wants to move back to England."

"She says that every time she breaks up with a crap boyfriend, which is pretty much every week." Greg speared a potato, pondering it before putting it into his mouth. "She's not pregnant again, is she? Baby number four to go with baby number three who's not even eating solids yet."

Celeste rolled her eyes. "I don't know. I just told her you would think about it."

"I've thought about it. No."

"Gregory..."

"There's no room here Maman! Where are we going to put them? They aren't sleeping in our living room for God knows how long a purgatory, and the two of you will fight like cats like you did all summer. Hell. No."

Celeste sat back in her chair and sucked the back of her teeth. She pushed her plate away, a passive aggressive ploy to annoy her son. She knew he hated it when she didn't eat. "What about you, Mycroft, mon cher, what do you think of it?"

When it came to Helene and her endless stream of drama, Mycroft did his best to stay out of it, but like all attention seekers Greg's sister had weaseled her way in, a peripheral blight on their perfect family. He didn't hate her, though he didn't especially like her or her dull witted children, two boys aged ten and eleven who had a habit of breaking the girls' toys, and a whiny baby that never seemed to stop pooping. The fights she had with Celeste were legendary, though Mycroft had to wonder at times if the adrenaline they induced was what was keeping Celeste alive. She certainly kept going back for more.

"I'll tell her she is not to come here," Celeste said, not waiting for his answer. "We cannot accommodate her follies."

"I'm not saying that, Maman, I'm saying there's no room here, there's a difference. There's an actual, physical problem with her coming here to live, not a judgement against how she lives."

"Why not?" Celeste said, waving away Greg's concern. "Someone has to be frank with her."

"Using me to do it is hardly helpful, I'll be the one she'll be yelling at instead of you."

Celeste snorted a laugh at this. "My darling Gregory, she will *always* fight with *me*, never with you!"

This was true. Mycroft had never understood it, but Greg could lay any kind of criticism on his sister and Helene wouldn't balk at it once. She adored her big brother, always fiercely independent and yet like a yippy puppy in his background all the time, eager to spend time with him.

Greg genuinely liked his little sister, even though he wasn't fond of her life choices or the way she and their mother fought. And even that was a conflict steeped in care, with Helene using her mother's wisdom as a force against which to vent while Celeste kept throwing it back at her, demanding she be stronger, for her own sake.

This was not the kind of dysfunction that pooled like cancer within his own family, where his brother self destructed to the point of nearly obliterating who he was, where a sister was so mired in her own selfish whims she had become deadly to all around her. His parents, clueless and reckless in the face of their childrens' brilliance, never bothering to truly look at the layers of hurt their flippant treatment of their abilities created.

He wondered where he would have ended up without Uncle Rudy's influence upon his life, guiding him, offering encouragement, being a mentor when all anyone truly wanted to do was pretend he didn't exist. Sherlock had done it. He'd deleted a sister. Mycroft often wondered why he didn't delete him, too.

"MyMy?"

He looked up. Caroline was offering him the steamed green beans.

"Thank you," he said, and took some.

"I steamed those ones all by myself. Daddy didn't help me once. The trick is to cook them until they are bright green, not dark green. They have to snap, see?" She picked one up and snapped it in half as a demonstration.

"They're worthy of fine dining, my dear girl, and I should know, I've supped with kings you know." He gave her an exaggerated prideful lilt of his chin. "I shall be sure to tell the Prime Minister you are an excellent chef."

There was a tiny lift in his heart over the fact that yes, he could be openly proud of his children now that the secret of their existence was out.

His daughter beamed happily at him, her legs kicking back and forth under her seat, in perfect sync with her sister beside her.

His cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and read the message displayed on the surface, a taunt he had been expecting.

*I'm telling Mummy  
\--SH*

***

Greg's hands clasped tight in his as he braced himself over him, his panting urgent and needful. Lips sighing Mycroft's name along with gentle curses devoured his own, tongues chasing one another as his body buckled with yet another jolt of unexpected pleasure.

Greg. Over him. Inside of him.

A steady, quickening rhythm.

He was pinned beneath him, hands clasped tight as his shoulders were pushed against the pillows at every rough thrust. He found him, that hidden jewel of feeling that was right...there...and Mycroft's stifled groan was a sudden, mournful cry out.

Greg's kisses became a wide, victorious grin. "Found my little minx's sweet spot...Again..."

"Gregory...I need to catch my breath..."

"You always say that," Gregory whispered, still grinning. "And yet you're always thrilled when I don't listen to you." He moved again and was rewarded for his efforts by Mycroft's pleading moan. "That's four little deaths so far, let's go for a few more. Keep your hand away, you sneaky little tart. I'd better keep a firmer grip on these hands of yours, keep them from wandering..."

"Oh...fuck...you bastard..."

"That's the idea."

The man knew how to hypnotize him, working over Mycroft's body until it bent to his will, crying out, begging, muscles tensed and relaxed, toes curled, a tightly wound spring, ferocious when it was finally permitted to relax. He wrestled his hands free and clawed at Gregory's back, shouting his name, white hot heat dancing within every molecule of his body until he shuddered, boneless, melting into the sheets. Over-sensitized to touch he shivered as Gregory's hands moved over him, the exploration suddenly gentle instead of deliciously rough.

He was thick muscle and bones made of granite. The heavy weight of him pressed Mycroft deeper into the mattress, hot kisses moving along his panting throat.

"Mm, I want to taste every little bit of you. Eat you up. Come here, you little pasty pastie." Hands, massaging his throat, tilting his head back and demanding an ever deeper kiss. When he pulled away he slid to Mycroft's side, his arm still wrapped tight around his midriff.

"I adore you," Mycroft whispered. He nipped at Gregory's shoulder, his tongue tasting his flesh. "I worship you."

Gregory bent his elbow, propping himself up to look down at Mycroft, his cocky grin triumphant. "You did. Six times. I counted."

Mycroft smiled up at him. "Was that a record?"

"Nah. Got seven on the wedding night."

"You're that confident of your record keeping?"

"A champion always tries to beat his highest score."

Mycroft's cell phone buzzed and he blindly reached for it on the floor where he'd dropped his trousers earlier that night. Greg nuzzled his face into the curve of his neck, tasting kisses moving along his throat. He grabbed the phone from Mycroft's hand, one dark brown eye scanning its lit surface.

"Lady Smallwood," Greg groaned. He handed the phone back to Mycroft. "Otherwise known in my book as 'The Afterglow Killer'." Greg flopped onto his back, groaning with delight into the comfort of his pillow, his hot flesh still a warm balm against Mycroft's flushed skin. "Tell her world peace has been achieved. It just took ample lube and proper pacing."

"You are incorrigible," Mycroft said, grinning back. He answered the phone, keeping his voice clipped. "Lady Smallwood. It's late."

"Sherrinford," Lady Smallwood said.

Every ounce of joy drained from his body and soul.

He sat up and moved to the edge of the bed, Gregory's hand pressed against the small of his back in tentative concern. Mycroft steeled himself and with a low shudder brought his officious, cold persona to the fore. "What's happened, Alicia?"

"We've had a near breach," she said, residual panic still in a low murmur both in her voice and in the hub of activity in the background. "A small plumbing repair had to be made on the opposite side of the wall of her cell."

She was being strangely reluctant to talk about details. Not a good sign.

"I can only make a proper assessment if I know all the facts," he reminded her.

"Then I'll be plain about it. The plumbing repair required drilling a section of concrete out of the opposite side of her cell wall. The barrier was weakened and your sister instantly determined the thinnest point. A tiny section of wall that had hole in it the size of a pence." She cleared her throat. Swallowed.

She'd probably been sick, Mycroft realized.

"Your sister killed a plumber. With the sharpened tip of a violin bow. She pierced him through his eye and into his frontal lobe causing massive hemorraging. In case you were wondering, no, the plumber didn't die instantly."

Mycroft's mouth went dry. He swallowed and the sensation was not unlike sipping a glass of sand. "I see. Is she otherwise secured?"

"Yes, we patched up the weak spot immediately. This is an odd behaviour, Mycroft, she's been near comatose for the past six months. Do you think this has something to do with Sherlock's visits? Has that triggered her in some way?"

Greg's palm was moving up and down the centre of his spine, a precious warmth that was both needed and felt like torture.

Sherlock was going to tell Mummy.

Mycroft frowned. "I'm not certain. Put extra security on her cell and monitor her around the clock. Alert me immediately if there is any change."

He hung up the cell and tossed it onto the end table beside the bed. Greg's fingers were now lightly touching the beaded bumps of his spine.

"Eurus," Greg said, and Mycroft silently nodded.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Greg asked.

Mycroft slid back into bed, curling into Gregory Lestrade's strong embrace, his face buried in his husband's chest.

"No," Mycroft said.

 


	3. aquaduct

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not being a British bobbie, I may have got some of the codes and procedures wrong, so if there is an expert in the house, be sure to let me know so I can fix it!
> 
> Thank you,everyone, who has been kindly commenting, the encouragement is amazing and humbling XX. I'm having a blast with this and am ploughing through it like it's a job o.O''.
> 
> And...Yes...Uncle Rudy does look just like Stephen Fry. Dead ringer, in fact. Who knew? ;P

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN TWO STRAIGHT LINES  
chapter three

_**London. April,1995.** _

 

Mycroft Holmes was feeling very pleased with himself. That morning, he'd unsettled the old guard at M16 with nothing more than a suggestion that civil surveillance could do them far more to combat the possibilities of domestic terrorism than any frontline skirmish. There was, as usual, the tired argument in favour of personal liberty and that there would be a loud outcry against such actions, but Mycroft knew better. The public was a field of sheep easily swayed, the agency in that boardroom surely understood this, for all it took was some grainy footage from a video camera catching a murder in the act and the subsequent arrest of a suspect for the frightened populace to give up the near entirety of their privacy. He didn't understand the reluctance, they were in the business of spying on people, there was no point in denying that fact. Shying away from being more obvious about it wasn't doing their department any favours. The public was quicker to hang suspects if there were visuals to go with it, as were international courts. Cutting out the need for imperfect human evidence gathering was a win for both the department's budget and a severe blow to red tape.

Dissension came from the usual place, and Mycroft bristled, thinking about it.

"Snatching people's privacy from them is a serious attack on their civil liberties, Mr. Holmes. Just because we *can* doesn't mean we *should*." Lady Smallwood narrowed her eyes on him, assessing his worth and finding him lacking. She was a prim, attractive woman in her mid forties who was well established among the old guard and had misgivings about letting Mycroft into this senior a position. He'd overheard her having a sotto voiced discussion about him with Uncle Rudy, the phrase 'arrogant ass' used more than once. He knew the way she took in his youth, the fact he was only twenty-one and barely out of his teens, an ageist prejudice that she would soon regret. He may appear young, but he was an adult since he was twelve, dire layers of responsibility shoved onto his shoulders until they were strong enough to carry the weight of the entire nation upon them. M16 had no idea he'd already been giving their top operative, his own Uncle Rudolph Holmes, significant tip offs and suggestions in regards to problems of national security since his thirteenth birthday. Uncle Rudy had learned his lesson when he hadn't followed Mycroft's advice regarding the Falklands. The fallout from that had nearly had the man retired.

So, as a gift for his twenty-first birthday for years of already secret service, Mycroft had been given a job. Though brilliant in the art of manipulative subterfuge and a decent enough actor, Uncle Rudy ensured that Mycroft's strengths as a negotiator and policy maker were pushed to the forefront, earning him a coveted position behind a powerful desk.

The heavily cushioned leather chair behind it was an especially thoughtful treat.

Though youthful, Mycroft had a very real lazy streak, preferring to spend most of his time with reams of paper and information rather than true human interaction. The very thought of 'field work' made him scrunch his face in distaste. Why wander out into danger in person when one could easily destroy conflict from a chair in a comfortable room?

There were certainly perks to being a desk shark. Reasonable hours, for one, day shifts that mostly ended at five o'clock on the dot and thus Mycroft's heavily ingrained habits could find respite. There was set to be the occasional fancy dinner party with upper politicians who were destined to scrabble for his friendship once they understood the importance of his wisdom. This car, which he was now parking in front of the exclusive Diogenes Club, the sleek, black Mercedes shining and new with brown and black leather and suede seats that filled his tactile aesthetic with little thrills of joy.

Likewise his new Gucci suit, tailored to perfection and certainly *not* ready made, the custom waistcoat beneath the sleek jacket hugging him close as he gracefully walked up the steps and into the Diogenes, a place which his Uncle Rudy assured him would welcome him regardless of how severely he ruffled feathers outside of it. The doors opened and he was allowed in, and Mycroft, a thin smile the only reaction he would give to anyone here, was literally doing cartwheels beneath his skin. The front foyer was a decadent throwback to Edwardian opulence, and with his dour mask firmly in place he allowed himself to be guided to the main Quiet Room. The air was thick with silence. Once behind those doors, no person was permitted to speak.

He felt triumphant at the way the old cronies raised their brows at his entrance, the silent tutting at his choice of throne which was smack dab in the middle of the room, a not so mute proclamation of his intended status. He sat in the comfortable, winged chair and propped up his feet on the settee before him, feeling as comfortable as one could be surrounded by the bliss of meditative silence.

It was a stark contrast, indeed, to the chaotic mess that was his family home, one that still housed his younger brother, Sherlock. The fourteen year old brat been kicked out of boarding school yet again, this time due to blowing up the chemistry lab in a misguided attempt to create a semi-liquid explosive he'd named ''walking napalm'.

He could feel the power of his new station in life in the very fibres of his chair, his youth not so immune to the temptation of that vanity. He sighed in contentment, solid in his feeling that he was the very wheel the world spun around and if Lady Smallwood didn't understand that yet, she most certainly would in future.

He spent a long afternoon there, reading through dozens of separate newspapers each in a different language and all giving subtle hints at world affairs which his sharp connectivity latched upon. He drank sweet tea and enjoyed two slices of strawberry and vanilla cake. By the time he rose to leave it was five o'clock and his day was finished. The time had not been wasted. Through careful contemplation he had already solved the Zapatista crisis in Mexico, which would find its resolution with his help by morning. Chiapas, in the Lacandon Jungle, would prove an excellent place for secret peace talks.

He stepped into the early spring evening air, nodding at the concierge in parting, his umbrella tapping out the rhythm of his steps as he descended the marble stairs to head for the delight of his shiny, new Mercedes. Bright sunlight bathed it in a supernatural glow and pride made its roost in his breast.

There was someone leaning on it.

At first he'd thought the man was an assigned driver, which he most certainly didn't need. A patch of cloud slid by and the sun was momentarily obscured from his eyes, revealing the ugly truth and leaving Mycroft's admittedly considerable ego scorched.

A policeman stood beside the car, scribbling out a ticket which, to Mycroft's horror, he slapped under the windshield wiper.

"What do you think you're doing?" Mycroft shouted at him.

Large brown eyes and a rather infuriating smirk greeted him. "You can't park here," he said. He braced himself on the windshield, leaving a greasy hand print on the glass as he snatched the ticket up and handed it in person to Mycroft. "You can pay the fine at the Department of Transportation office on Horseferry Road."

"I know where the damned office is," Mycroft snapped as he tore the ticket from the policeman's hand.

"There's construction out front," the policeman added, being overly helpful. "You'll have to park a block down from it or else risk another one of these." He waved his ticket book at him. "Nice wheels, by the way, though I'm partial to BMW's myself. More reliable for commuting and easier on the gas."

"I know damned well where to park, I was at the Department of Transportation this morning."

"Really?" The policeman's large brown eyes looked amused, that irascible smirk never leaving him. "You work there, then?"

The man thought he was a lowly government clerk? In this suit?

Infuriating simpleton!

This policeman was going to rue the day he dared to test the patience of Mycroft Holmes, the maker of policy, the destroyer of global threats! And he was ready to fire off an admittedly highly arrogant tirade to that very fact, only for the voice of Sherlock to intrude on his consciousness, his sneering, nasal whine stating: 'You can't say that, you bloody fool, he'll think you daft. You're nothing out there, just like you've always been.'

With that his bravado was instantly quashed. "Yes," he found himself saying. "I am merely a lowly government civil servant kept caged to my desk at the Department of Transportation." Then, as a probing aside, "Which naturally means you need not give me a ticket. The fine is superfluous."

The policeman chewed the inside of his cheek. "I don't think that's how it works, mate. I don't care where you work, you get a ticket, you pay the fine."

"Yes, but as a civil servant already on their payroll the funds I would give up would be circular." He handed the ticket back to the policeman. "I suggest you tear this up and forget about it lest it cause you some unexpected embarrassment."

But the policeman wouldn't back down. "Oi, who do you think you are? My bloody embarrassment?"

"You would be wasting taxpayer's time and money."

"You're wasting mine right now if that threat is what I think it is."

Mycroft decided to play it oblique. "I am simply suggesting it is in your best interests to dispose of this ticket."

The policeman braced his hands on his hips and let out a low huff, his growling tones cutting across the small car park. "Well, that's not on. Frankly I'm thinking you can be in a spot of trouble if you keep trying to weasel out of it like this. I ain't the court of law, I'm just the law, and last I heard it's a still illegal to try and sway the rules in your favour. I'd be checking my mouth if I were you before you get into some real trouble."

Mycroft raised his chin in a huff and he shoved the ticket back at the policeman. "This is unnecessary. I refuse it."

The policeman actually laughed at this. "Look, I don't care if you're the king of bloody Siam, you're taking it and you're paying the fine, full stop, now take this, shove it up your tight arse and spew out some coin for the Department of Transport!" He shoved the ticket in Mycroft's coat pocket. "Have a nice day, you berk!"

"I have made a note of your badge number," Mycroft stiffly said to him. He unlocked his Mercedes and slid into the driver's seat. "Your supervisor will be hearing from me."

"I hope he does," the policeman said, giving him a salute by tapping the ticket book against the brim of his helmet. "I could use some points in my favour. Getting privileged prats off the road is one of his favourite things. In fact..." The policeman suddenly reached over him and snatched Mycroft's keys out of the ignition, turning off the engine. "I just might be onto something here. Licence and registration, please."

Mycroft was gobsmacked by his audacity. "You can't be serious!"

"Hand the lot over. Now. Or do you want me to write you up another fine, one way heftier than that last one? You're racking them up, just saying. Step out of the vehicle, please. Licence. Registration."

Mycroft was not accustomed to cursing, but he was becoming a quick, muttering study by the minute. He opened the glove compartment and took the required documents out before stepping out of his Mercedes in a huff. The policeman studied his driver's licence carefully, and Mycroft decided it was high time he did one of his own.

This bobbie was shiny and new. He wasn't born in London, though he spent most of his life here, immigrating to a neighbourhood that wasn't wealthy by any means but was better than what one would find in Pimlico. The accent gave that part away easily enough, the growling cockney marred by a near undetectable lilt underneath it that suggested he spoke a different language at home. He was tanned and thus enjoyed the sun, unlike his Englishman peers. There was a certain relaxed grace to him that suggested a more Mediterranean upbringing, but with a hint of la toque that was specifically French. He grew up in a house, a small one in a crowded in neighbourhood that had seen better days, and he was still living there as indicated by the type of worn, concrete mud on the heel of his shoes. The area was seeing a resurgence with new construction, and was in the process of becoming a higher end neighbourhood. His house was the last one standing amongst the new developments, suggesting he had a stubborn streak and had no real love for money. He lived with a woman, but not a girlfriend. A mother, who was fond of expensive French perfumes. Bright, cheap pink lipstick on the inside collar of his uniform, barely detectable, was indicative of a younger, spirited sister. She liked being in his good graces.

Handsome in a lazy way, he never had to try hard at it and he possessed a naturally athletic build, as far in scope as one could get from Mycroft's own physicality. He was close to Mycroft's age, and this was his first job as a policeman, his insistence on following the law to the letter indicating he was very new at it, perhaps only a couple of weeks. He was gay but not closeted. Mycroft wasn't sure how he'd deduced this. It might have been the smirk.

The policeman's radio came back with a stream of information that Mycroft didn't fully understand at first. The raised brow that he was given, however, suggested his troubles had only just begun.

"Thanks, Maggie," the policeman growled into the radio at his shoulder. "Looks like this is one that slipped through the cracks."

What was that supposed to mean?

"Right." The policeman stood in front of him, hands on hips, his licence, registration and car keys now in his full possession. "You got a real habit of this, from the list I was just given. Driving on a median, driving the wrong way on a roundabout, parking illegally in front of a school, you ran three red lights last week alone...I mean the list goes on, but let's just save my breath for what's important. You are way over the points limit, mate, and according to our records your licence was officially revoked a week ago. There is no way in hell I can give you your licence or your keys back."

"What? I received no such notice!"

"Lost mail is not my division. Sorry, but your very nice car is getting towed. I got a job to protect the public."

Mycroft felt as though he'd been punched. "I don't understand, I've never had a discussion about this with a police officer before! I've never been handed a ticket!"

The policeman gave him a wide, dazzling grin. "It's all automated now, innit? We got them new cameras put in at the major intersections, catch all kinds of crap drivers now. Your licence plate came out nice and clear in the snapshots. I ought to thank you, really, all those fines add up to me getting my credits for the week and it's only Tuesday."

This was preposterous! He watched, his mouth agape as the whistling policeman requested a DLVP tow truck through his radio and then, in a further insult, tipped his hat to Mycroft and hopped onto his bright yellow Met issued bicycle, ready to just wheel away with the keys to Mycroft's favourite perk in his pocket.

"Wait!" Mycroft shouted at him, and the policeman hit the brakes on his government issued ten speed with a loud squeal. Mycroft trotted up to him (one didn't *run* in a customized Gucci suit), his cool demeanour demolished, leaving a stammering idiot with a posh sense of entitlement in its place. "You can't leave me here like this!"

The policeman shrugged and nodded at the entrance to the Diogenes. "Use their phone. Call a cab. Not my problem."

"I can't do that!"

"Why not?"

"It's a silent club, no one is allowed to talk!" Mycroft stamped his feet, clad in expensive Italian leather, on the pavement, wishing he could will the doltish man to understand. "I can't ask for a cab when I can't talk!"

The policeman gave him an odd look, which was quickly given over to the entrance of the Diogenes Club, whose doors were stubbornly closed against Mycroft's predicament. He scratched the back of his head and winced at the sudden onslaught of bright sunlight that reflected off of the white building directly into his dark brown eyes.

"Can't you just call me a cab through your dispatch?" Mycroft offered.

"Nah, can't be doing civvy calls on this. Could get a write up and I'm too green for that. I ain't getting stuck on this duty forever, and if I keep myself all mired in regulation I can move up the ladder quicker." He grinned again as he grew animated with ambition. "They got a kind of right of passage for these things at the Met, and what I really want is to move house and catch the eye of the homicide division at the Yard. Can write the detective exams in a couple of years, once my feet are properly wet. They take the tough, smart ones for the gumshoe parade and I aim to shine just right for them."

"Don't count on it," a pouting Mycroft Holmes said as he crossed his arms in front of him.

"Right, so it's a bloody mime convention in there and the only phones they have are invisible." The policeman sighed and checked his watch. "I'm off duty in ten minutes. What I can do is walk with you to the Mall and help you flag down a cab from there."

Mycroft rolled his eyes. "That's not going to work either."

"And why's that?"

"Because I don't have any money for a cab."

The policeman bit the inside of his cheek and dully nodded his head at this. "Might have mentioned that first before using way too many words about that place's silent treatment."

"My flat is all the way on the other side of Regent's Park," Mycroft complained, hating the whine creeping into his voice. "I haven't anything on me, not even to use the Underground."

"Seems to me, Mr. Holmes, you're just one problem after another."

Now that was just being facetious. "I'll have you know," Mycroft snapped, looking down his nose at this admittedly ridiculously fine specimen of Met rookie, "that I do not cause problems, I *solve* them! That is my job!"

"You don't seem to be very good at it right now," the policeman quipped.

No, this was wrong, this was rotten, he was going to be trudging on foot to Regent's Park and he was already feeling sweaty, his expensive Italian leather shoes pinched, the waistcoat was riding up his stomach, his tie felt too tight and he could hear Sherlock's 'Nyaah, nyaaah, fatty loser!' in his head so clearly it was as if the gangly, pimple faced prat was standing in front of him, shouting it into his face. Mummy was standing beside him, demanding to know if Mycroft knew how to do anything right at all.

Mycroft Holmes, destroyer of policy and toppler of kings, oh bugger, his first week and he was already making a mess of everything, and his supervisor already hated him and the only solace he had was a roomful of people who wouldn't dare talk to each other. Sod it and rot it, Mycroft thought, his arms crossed and his chin tucked furtively against his chest as he began the march home. He should tell Uncle Rudy where to stuff that stupid gift of a job and leave him in peace to study cartography like he really wanted.  
  
The clicking tick of bicycle wheels calmly caught up to him, and he was surprised to see the policeman following him. "Am I going to get a ticket for walking?" Mycroft sneered.

"No." That smirk was back. Infuriating man! "I was thinking that it's a long walk to Regent's Park but it's a very short distance to my house."

Mycroft felt a jolt of uncertainty at that prospect. He wanted Mycroft on his home turf. Why? He seemed unreasonably eager to go above and beyond duty and why would a silly man in a Gucci suit warrant that kind of help? "You seem to be getting quite personal about this," Mycroft said. There, let him stew on that blunt fact and see where it got him.

"In that case, I should properly introduce myself. Lestrade." He took his hand off the handle of his bicycle and held it out to Mycroft to shake. "Or, as they like calling me back at the Met, 'Green As Grass Gregory Lestrade'."

"Gregory," Mycroft said, trying the name out on his tongue. He rather liked it. It had a distinguished, lyrical cadence. He shook his hand. It was a firm contrast to Mycroft's cool, dry palm, all manner of strength within it. He held it just a beat too long and then broke the connection quickly, suddenly feeling bashful. "I'm not sure what going to your house is meant to accomplish."

"Your the civvy in the Department for Transport, I think you can figure it out," Gregory said, and smirked. "I was thinking, we could go to my place, I could drop off the bike, get changed quick and give you a lift home in my car. It ain't a posh set of wheels like your Mercedes--It's a crap beater that's only barely road worthy--but it's better than wearing out a pair of nice shoes like those, innit?"

There was an invitation in the way his dark eyes sparkled when he spoke, but Mycroft couldn't begin to guess what it meant. What he did understand was that a very handsome policeman wanted him to follow him home, like some stray puppy he'd found abandoned in a park. Mycroft kept his arms crossed over his chest, his cheeks burning at Lestrade's scrutiny, that unbearable smirk looking suspiciously like flirting. It couldn't be that, no one flirted with the serious, cold, pudgy Mycroft Holmes with his overdressed suits and humourless, pinched face. Handsome men like Lestrade didn't look at him with that kind of blatant, cheerful curiosity, with soft, easy smiles that suggested 'If you want to, I'll kiss you with these lips,' and just the thought made Mycroft press his chin further down towards his chest in a vain attempt to hide.

 

_**London. December, 1995.** _

 

He had promised himself he wasn't going to end up naked in Gregory's bed again, which naturally meant that's exactly where he was, caving to the temptation of strong, hot hands and kiss bruised flesh. A stolen afternoon session of steamy frottage was exactly what he needed after spending hours in what had been the most boring meeting Mycroft had ever had the displeasure to endure, and he'd sat in on Mummy's physics lectures. The woman could make a jar of grape juice turn to wine by the time her droning was done.

Sticky with cum and breathless from vigorous lovemaking, Gregory certainly knew how to draw every facet of licentious energy from Mycroft's body. He felt exhausted and exhilarated all at the same time, his heart hammering hard in his chest as Gregory lathed him with wet kisses that travelled down his neck, his torso and along the flaking stains across his belly. His lips were salty when they returned to Mycroft's own. He felt his perceptions haze as he broke free, warm brown eyes drunk with satisfaction drinking every detail in.

"You are so fucking beautiful."

Mycroft let out a satisfied sigh as Gregory sank over him again, kisses possessive and forceful. The strangeness of the statement, said often before, after and during their coupling, never ceased to fill him with a sense of shocked amazement. The fact he was even here, allowing another person touch him in this intimate fashion, and that the other was actually enjoying the interaction...In all of his scenarios that he projected for his own future, the affection of a shockingly handsome man like Constable Gregory Lestrade was noticeably absent.

"I'm a bit softer than I'd like to be," Mycroft said between passionate caresses. "I've started a new diet."

"Mm, you don't need to be on a stupid diet, you're gorgeous, every inch of you." Gregory paused, and leaned up on his elbow, looking down at him with knowing concern. "It's that little snot brother of yours and his needling comments, you're like this every time you go and visit that house. They sap every drop of confidence out of you. Let me guess, Mummy kept going on about the benefits of salad while at the same plying you full of baked sweets."

"She is getting a head start on her Christmas baking," Mycroft said.

"Ah. And darling little ickle Sherlock, he still as perfect as ever?"

"He was caught selling his Ritalin to some fourth form boys. He claims it was an experiment meant to expose the exploitive nature of supply and demand economics, and Mummy grounded him for a day, preventing him from using his chemistry set. Didn't last, of course, he had sensitive projects that needed his monitoring and Mummy, ever keen to keep him occupied, allowed him to make notes."

Greg made a disapproving grunt as he nuzzled into the curve of Mycroft's neck, the warmth of him a pleasure that laid over him like a drug. "Spoiled brat." He pulled Mycroft close. "Have you told them about me?"

"Goodness gracious, no," Mycroft said, and Gregory chuckled into his skin, his hot breath sweet and pleasing. "All Sherlock has figured out is that I'm more miserable than ever when I visit, and he has no clue it's because I'm losing time with you." He turned onto his side, allowing Greg to fully embrace him, light kisses placed upon the length of his nose and returned to Gregory's soft lips.

"I go mad when you're gone," Gregory admitted, and Mycroft smiled at this, a perverse thrill rushing through him at the thought there was at least one person in the world who found his absence tortuous.

The front door opened and slammed shut, Celeste back from shopping, the steady clip of her heels punctuation marks on the scuffed oak flooring of her house as she journeyed into the kitchen and put grocery bags on the counter. Her hard steps echoed upwards again as she headed for the front of the house. She had a habit of leaving her heels on and her steps would echo throughout the little 1930's bungalow she had been given by her third husband as a parting gift in their divorce. Property developers harassed her daily to sell it, offering staggering amounts. She flatly refused. Celeste envisioned the life she'd forged when she'd left France and immigrated to London as a positive step towards her full independence and no dollar amount was going to steal that from her.

"Gregory, etes-tu ici?" She could be heard hanging her coat up in the front closet. "Mycroft, vous aussi?"

"Oui, Maman!" Gregory shouted. He sighed and forced himself away from Mycroft's side and out of his bed. He pulled on a pair of jeans and an old t-shirt that was in his laundry pile, his hand held up bidding Mycroft to remain where he was. "I don't need the teasing from her today. It's bad enough I got a ribbing at the Met over the new front desk clerk who's apparently got a crush on me. I can't say a word against it, not with the way things are in there right now, and any of that kind of attention is a good cover, if you ask me. Don't ask, don't tell, right? Makes me sick. It's a stupid world we're in, Mycroft, when I can't even hold your hand in public without worrying about a punch-up or worse. I can't just openly kiss you on the front porch when we leave for work and tell you I love you. I suppose it's not all bad, I'm glad we have this, that we can be open here, and Maman has been great. It hasn't been the same for a lot of the other guys on the force I know. It can get pretty damn ugly, in fact."

Mycroft didn't know how to respond. Words dried up in his throat, the information Gregory so blithely surrendered hitting him with all the force of a wrecking ball.

_"I love you."_

"I wonder why he needed it," Gregory said, zipping up the fly on his jeans.

Mycroft frowned. He was still reeling at Gregory's near subconscious admission. He wondered if this is what it felt like and reasoned it must, this all encompassing need to be near him, this possessive hold upon his mind and soul to the point he felt as though he'd actually die if Gregory was pulled from his life.

"Who?" Mycroft asked.

"Your little bratty brother, Sherlock," Gregory said as he left the bedroom, bare feet on stained oak flooring. "I wonder what he needs all the money from selling Ritalin for."

Mycroft stared at the ceiling, not really thinking about it, not caring. He didn't want thoughts of his brother or any member of his family looming over the bliss of Gregory's unbidden revelation. "I don't know."

"Doesn't matter, I guess." He gave Mycroft a dazzling smile, the one that made his heart flutter because yes, that smile was all for him, for Mycroft Holmes and no one was ever going to erase it if he could help it. "Come on down after you clean up a bit. Maman is planning on cooking. Might need to keep that fire extinguisher under the sink handy. Hope you like your chicken with cigarette ash."

  
_**London. July, 1998.** _

 

Constable Gregory Lestrade squinted in the bright afternoon summer sunlight and figured it just didn't get much better than this.

The Yard had noticed him. He was on his way up.

Constable Sally Donovan was constantly at his heels, begging him to let some of that good luck rub off on her, too. He warned her she'd be regretting that when they both got into CID and became partners, but Sally had bought him a pint and told him to piss off. "You'll be running the place while I'm following your lead and you know it. By the way, that dispatcher what had the crush on you had her baby last week. Kid don't look nothing like the dad, you know the one, that bloke with the limp who works in the IT department. Little tyke's the spitting image of the janitor that works here overnight, got his cross eyes and all."

"Gary? The guy with the brain injury? Head all caved in on the left side?"

"Yeah, must be hung like a horse, that's the only sense I can make of it. Unless she's gone just as loopy, you know how it is. Night shifts, they'll do you in."

Night shift had been difficult, and it was a great relief to see sunlight without a residual feeling of exhaustion. He'd been wearing the uniform well for the past two years and was long off the traffic duty. Ambition had made him seek more than he was offered and he took advantage of interesting cases when he could. The higher ups in CID were finally casting glances his way since that bust up of the meth lab in Pimlico. He got his mug in the papers and editors were happy to plaster his smiling face on the cover of every rag in London, though of course The Daily Mail accused him of being a drug kingpin himself out to snuff the competition. Lying bints.

He fumed, cursing all the way home over that until Mycroft assured him the 'news' in the Mail was actually covert code for his operatives. "The paper serves a duel purpose, both giving the duller realms of the criminal element false leads and informing M16 spies of the location of upcoming briefings. It's been quite effective."

Lestrade hadn't believed him until he'd scanned a lengthy article in the Mail claiming crack cocaine was an excellent fruit preservative and realized if he plucked the first word of every paragraph in order they formed the sentence: 'Basement Beneath The Victoria Memorial Seven In The Evening Snacks Provided'.

The Daily Mail could accuse him of molesting eggplants in the produce aisle of Safeway for all he cared, their typing didn't stop his superiors from raising their heads and giving his proud work a good once over. The meth lab he'd taken out was built in a small abandoned basement room in a low-income housing complex, and word from forensics was if he hadn't found the bastards when he did there were enough chemicals to blow half the block to bits. He got a personal pat on the back from the Superintendent for his initiative into investigative work and it was just the push he needed to write his detective exams and secure his place among the rabble who earned the respect of Dickens.

If this didn't get him out of the button mob, nothing would.

The radio on his shoulder crackled into life and Maggie, the day dispatcher, marred the perfection of the afternoon with coded crime. "Lestrade, there's a 10-14 in Ecclestone Mews, #23, are you still in the area?"

"It's a lovely sunny afternoon in Belgravia," he assured her. "Copy that, Maggie. I'm on it."

He got into his panda and drove it the short distance to Ecclestone Mews, the long rows of million dollar properties too small for any actual opulence. A break and enter in a posh neighbourhood like this would be under the watchful eye of not only Mycroft's CCTV cameras but those belonging to security companies and private owners. Whoever was hoping to squat here was set to be found out and tossed in jail before he even had a chance to steal anything. It was a stupid ploy, every thief worth his salt knew the better places to nick from were in nearby Pimlico where the CCTV cameras kept getting smashed by local hoods.

He parked the panda in front of the tiny slab of stone that couldn't possibly be more than two bedrooms and which easily fetched a million pound price tag. There were no obvious signs of entry, no broken windows and there wasn't a back entrance, just a windowless wall of brick on the other side of the structure. He got out of the panda and approached the address with caution, his hand on the radio in case things got ugly. Before making any moves to jimmy windows and check for holes in the roof, Lestrade did what Mycroft often told him was the best approach when dealing with these sorts of problems. Namely, check the obvious first.

He turned the handle on the front door and was surprised to find it open. He stepped inside.

A heavy thwack hit the back of his head. The only thing running through his mind as he went down was that the empty place was even smaller than he'd thought, even with the pale, beige pine flooring and matching beige walls..

***

Stars shot hot and prickling behind the backs of his eyes and he rubbed his hand along his neck, working out the bruises he was sure were just under the skin. An aching shake of his head brought him into full consciousness and he was surprised to find himself sitting up in a plastic chair in the middle of a bright, far too small open concept kitchen and living room, the flat devoid of natural sunlight. He was still in the address on Ecclestone Mews, but he couldn't tell if it was night or day. He felt like he'd been out for hours.

"Oh, good, you're finally conscious. Lovely. Don't move from the chair, Detective Constable Gregory Lestrade, I wouldn't want to have to indispose you again. Repetitive brain injury can cause all manner of future complications and I think the Yard would prefer your grey matter to be at optimum efficiency."

He blinked, bringing a freakishly tall, broad shouldered man into focus, who looked down on him with the droopy eyes of an inquisitive hound dog. The shape of his face held the outline of pure noble English stock, the kind one finds on cousins of royalty and butlers. A pursed little mouth gave Lestrade's glare a small smile that very much met a delighted twinkle in those bagged green eyes. He rolled heel to toe on his feet, as though he was about to give a university lecture on grammar. He was dressed impeccably, in a simple suit and tie that was pressed and clean with nary a hair or shred of lint daring to interrupt its black surface. His demeanour was cheerful, though the pain in the back of Lestrade's neck told him the man approached all of his work this way, including blind sided smack downs.

"Assaulting an officer is against the law," Lestrade growled at him.

That smile was fixed on him with a familiar lilt of his chin, one that held far more information than he was willing to give. "I'm very sorry for this manner of intrusion, I suppose there were easier ways to have this meeting. But the thing is, Detective Constable Lestrade, I wanted to impress upon you the importance of what we are to discuss. There are realms within this conversation that the very fabric of countries and war will hinge upon, and these are not things that men such as I are able to take lightly."

Lestrade frantically reached for his radio on his shoulder and pawed at his uniform's fabric. It was gone.

"You see, there are certain histories that have to be revealed that I'm not sure you are capable of understanding."

Lestrade didn't hear a word. Let the crazy coot ramble, it gave him time to figure out his game plan. What to do? Tackle him, sure, but the guy was easily two of Lestrade and had already proved he had the strength of ten. Retreat was his only option and there weren't any exits save for the front door, which he noticed was now locked. The front window was encased in a cage of white ironwork. That and the one directly above it in the upstairs bedroom were the only windows in the entire flat.

"Gregory?" The man snapped his fingers in front of his face and Lestrade winced at them. The cheerful demeanour had dimmed, leaving a layer of stern resolve in its place.

The mood in the empty room was suddenly dangerous. There was no cheer in those hound dog eyes now, just the hungry need to harm.

He had to wonder, with the way the man could switch a mood like that, a feeling of lurking sadism underneath the cheerful button lips...Lestrade thought, was he going to chop one of his fingers off or something? Pull out his teeth and ask over and over, 'Is it safe?'

"You really must pay attention. The matters I wish to discuss with you are of the utmost importance not just to crown and country, but to me. So I suggest you don't let your small mind wander off in search of escape, you must sit patiently and be very attentive for I am going to ask you questions and you are going to answer them, and you will not lie. That is absolutely not advisable for I am capable of detecting even the smallest untruth, a gift that has served my purposes well. If you do lie, I can promise you that you will lose the use of your legs. Permanently. Do we understand one another?"

"Fuck me, what are you on about?"

The man sighed as though Gregory had failed a test and took two long strides into the kitchen where he snatched up a pair of massive branch cutters. "I've found these are quite effective when severing the spinal cord between the thoratic nerves T7 and T8. Do sit down, Gregory. I just want to have a little chat, you are to answer my questions honestly, and there will be no harm done."

Greg could feel his legs quake, a loose feeling in the pit of his abdomen that pressed on his bowels. He couldn't let this psychopathic bastard see how scared he was. He swallowed, and chose every word with care.

"You better start fucking asking them, then."

"Your candour is appreciated," the man said, his cheerful mood suddenly returned. He placed the branch cutters on the kitchen counter and clasped his hands once again behind his back, his looming height monstrous above Gregory's terrified form.

"What are your intentions with my nephew, Mycroft Holmes?"

Lestrade's mouth hung open. "What...What's Mycroft got to do with this?" He half leapt out of his chair only to be cowed back into it with the threat of the branch cutter. "You better not have touched him, do you hear me, you bloody starched bastard or I'll fucking kill you!"

Brows raised, the man propped the branch cutters on the floor at his feet in much the same way Mycroft often leaned on his umbrella. For now, the threat of a severed spine was removed. "I see. You are very protective of him, a good sign. One check mark in your favour. But you did not answer my question."

Vicious scenarios cascaded through Lestrade's panicked consciousness. They'd kept things quiet but maybe word got out thanks to Sherlock, maybe he figured things out and now Lestrade was facing the wrath of a twisted sense of family honour, one mired in sick homophobia. He'd seen it enough, young men beaten within an inch of their lives by their own fathers, no one coming to visit them in hospital, families shunning them, their malignant hatred spurred on by an ignorance they wallowed in, not caring how deep the harm went.

Lestrade seethed. "I *intend* you fucking gay bashing prick, to not let you near him!"

He dove out of his chair and used it as a barrier against the monolith bearing down on him, the branch cutters brought down on the plastic and shattering it with a loud smack. Keeping the metal legs of the chair in front of him as a pathetic barrier, he managed to lunge it at the giant as he loomed in for another strike. The broken metal tip of the chair's leg grazed the man's cheek dangerously close to gauging his eye, giving Lestrade just enough time to bolt it up the stairs by the kitchen to the second floor. Two bedrooms greeted him, but only one had a front facing window.

He had to act, not think.

Long legs hoofed it up the stairs as Lestrade used the heavy metal legs of the chair to smash the upstairs window. Heedless of the broken glass cutting into his palms he scrambled out of it and over the edge, the climb down eased by his bleeding grip on the white ironwork encasing the front story window.

He ran for the panda. The front door opened and the madman tried to chase after him, but Lestrade was already screeching down the pavement, blood pouring over his car's radio. "Maggie! Lestrade, Ecclestone Mews, we've got a 10-35, request immediate back-up, request armed officers sent to my home address, I want a full firearms unit sent, do you copy, Maggie?"

"10-69, Lestrade. Units en route."

Son of a bitch. He was bleeding all over the dashboard, deep gauges in his palms smarting as he clutched the steering wheel. But he had to get home, he had to check on Mycroft because for fuck's sake, he'd been threatened, hadn't he, by that crazy bastard, and he had to get home, he had to get there and make sure he was safe.

He tried to push aside the image of Mycroft, hurt and bleeding, let a foul mess on the floor of the little bungalow, his spinal cord severed and...No. He couldn't think of that now. He had to focus, he had to get home.

He had to tear him out of that little house and find him somewhere safe.

By the time he pulled up in front of it he could hear what were dozens of armed police vehicles in the background heading to his home address. Swirling lights illuminated the dusk. He brought the panda to a screaming halt in the driveway, and near collapsed out of it as he recklessly ran towards the little house, shoving his bloodstained badge at every questioning face approaching it until he made it to his front porch and, not bothering to dig for his keys, he kicked open the door.

"Mycroft!" he shouted into it.

There was the sound of creaking stairs, and a frantic Lestrade followed it, only to be confused as each lazy step found its way down towards him.

Mycroft yawned. He was in a dressing gown and his hair was damp. He'd had a shower. He was wearing pyjamas.

He'd been woken from his sleep.

He looked blearily at Lestrade who stood bleeding and miserable and finally surrounded by armed to the teeth police. He frowned, a little 'w' in the centre of his forehead that was so fucking cluelessly adorable Lestrade could have pissed himself in relief.

"You're home late. What's going on?"

"Perhaps that's something you should tell me, dear nephew."

Lestrade felt his stomach drop. He turned, wide eyed, to see the monster he'd been escaping and hoping to save the love of his life from standing in the open doorway, perfect and calm.

But not entirely, Lestrade thought. There was that nasty cut on his cheek bleeding through a flesh coloured plaster.

"Uncle Rudy," Mycroft said, still confused. He peered past his uncle's shoulder to the milieu of police and firearms units which were now quietly dispersing from the green space. The neighbours were staring out of their windows, some outside in slippers and bathrobes, with hands clasped at their gaping mouths in curious terror.

Mycroft's confusion turned to horror as he took in the state of Lestrade's hands. "Oh my God, Gregory, you're bleeding!"

"My fault, I'm afraid," the large man known as Uncle Rudy said, closing the front door behind him as he stepped into the little house. "I should have made a proper introduction. Hello, Detective Constable Gregory Lestrade, I am Rudolph Garret Holmes, Mycroft's uncle. It's good to meet you." His cheer faltered slightly. "No, I don't suppose it is a good idea for me to shake your hand. Nasty cuts. They will need stitches."

Lestrade seethed. "*You* are Uncle Rudy?"

"Yes, we've established that, do catch up. I must say, Mycroft, what he lacks in analysis he makes up for in emotional connection. A quick thinker, even quicker to act in situations of great duress and is not, it is important to note, a man prone to be easily swayed in the face of a brutal threat." Uncle Rudy gave Mycroft his practised, cheerful smile. "Well done. Detective Constable Lestrade is a lovely addition to the family."

"I'm not a DC, I'm just one of the button mob," Lestrade said to him. His hands felt like wires were slowly being twisted across them, cutting them anew. He went into the kitchen and ran his cuts under cold, running water.

"Yes, but not for long, I took the liberty of checking your results, a hundred percent on the detective exam is unheard of, you truly are made for the work. Oh now, don't look so shocked, I may be retired but I still remember my old job . No stone unturned in the spy business. Shall we retire to somewhere more comfortable, perhaps the living room?"

Son of a bitch. Was there anyone in Mycroft's family who wasn't a mad prat?

"I suppose you're going to want tea," Lestrade growled from the kitchen. He wrapped his injured hands in tea towels.

"Tea would be lovely," Uncle Rudy said. He set his large bulk onto the old sofa with careful grace. Mycroft stood silent behind it, that little 'w' never wavering once.

"But it can wait. Come, Gregory, have a seat with Mycroft here on the sofa. If you are to be a permanent part of this family, as I predict you will be, there are certain things you must understand."

Mycroft let out a small gasp. "Please, Uncle Rudy...Must we?"

"These things aren't meant to fester," Uncle Rudy said, and he winced, his large fingertips touching the plaster hiding the cut Lestrade inflicted on him. "I think it's time we had a long talk about Eurus."

 

 


	4. inlet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock decides to be proactive when it comes to getting to know his nieces. Mycroft has an ultimatum first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know! This was sort of put on the back burner for a little while as original projects starting attacking me. Back at it, though, and having a blast, as always. WARNING: There may be some non-con-ish weirdness that's JohnLock in nature, but it's hard to say who is non-conning who, specifically. Not sure how else to explain that. Anyway...Enjoy, I hope!

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN TWO STRAIGHT LINES  
chapter four

Water dripped, a steady black stream that seeped along black algae strewn stone. He could feel its slimy texture beneath his fingertips as he stumbled, blind across the confines of the cell. The iron stench of death permeated the air within it, and he kept close to the damp stone walls, afraid of journeying outwards into the black emptiness that surrounded him. He shivered, the damp permeated with cold, ocean air that seeped through the stone walls and through his skin and into the marrow of his bones. He pressed his back against the wall and slid to the wet floor, into a thick puddle.

Darkness suffocated him. He could hear his pulse, a staccato snare drum against the back of his ear, reminding him he was still alive, but perhaps not for long.

'Myy--croooft...'

A childish sing-song voice, echoed through the bleak confines, reverberating across the stone walls, making it impossible to discern its starting point. He could hear his pulse quicken, the drumming of it a thick bass inside of his skull. He pulled his knees up to his chest, listening carefully to the drip, drip of water that was coming from somewhere in the centre of the room. A leaking pipe, perhaps. There had always been problems with the plumbing at Sherrinford, the rock it was built on unexpectedly porous.

'Myyy-crooooft...'

He pressed his hands tight over his ears, against the sing-song whisper that was bidding him to stand up and play. Eurus and her deadly games that were mired in hate and destruction.

Had she killed John Watson?

It was more than likely. Sherlock was her favourite toy. She had a habit of discarding what didn't entertain her. He wondered where John was, if he had been killed in front of Sherlock, a ploy she would no doubt use to destroy him, a kind of cyclic return to her first murderous triumph that had damaged Sherlock in ways his impulsive younger brother still didn't understand yet.

Perhaps she left him in some hole to rot. It appeared that was the plan in his case.

'Myy-croooft...Into the deeps you go, into the dark, who will find you, Mycroft? Come out, come out, wherever you are...'

He tried to cling to his oasis, to think of his girls huddled together in front of the large screen TV, sharing cheese nibs with Plum, who greedily licked the inside of the empty bag. Their wild blonde curls thick and soft and nearly hidden beneath their duvet as they watched with wide blue eyes the sinister shade of Boris Karloff, a modernist Dracula stalking his latest victim in harsh black and white contrast. Gregory, snoring on the sofa, not waking as Mycroft slid into his arms and fit himself perfectly against his husband's flank. On the enclosed back porch, in her wicker chair, Celeste sending tender plumes of silken smoke across the expanse of night sky.

His family...Oh God, oh God no, had she found them? Did she know?

'Myy-croooooft...You can't hide anything from me...Open your eyes, Mycroft...Tell me what you see...'

The cell was suddenly blasted with light, momentarily blinding him with its white hot brilliance. It hurt to open his eyes and focus. The pulse in his head became a crescendo that blotted all other sounds out.

Save for that drip, drip, drip, which echoed inside of his consciousness, stabbing him with each deafening droplet.

He looked up and found the source.

Sherlock, hung in pieces, the blood from his body still seeping out in thick, blackened red drops. Mycroft brought his hands to his face and they were stained red. He'd been lying not in a puddle of water but his brother's spent blood.

A flash of gold within the puddle beneath his brother's severed head took on a profound significance. He knew that ring, he'd chosen it himself. It was the same as the one he wore.

Sherlock's bloodied mouth opened and closed, his eyes rolled back in a tortured expression begging for death. Thin streams of saliva and soured blood poured from his brother's split lips.

Eurus, calling him out to play.

'Myyy-croooft...'

***

The bloodcurdling scream woke them from a shared dream, tearing Caroline and Madeline awake. They could hear their father's sandpaper voice shouting at MyMy, demanding that he wake up. This wasn't the first time they had such a violent awakening this year, but the residual fear it placed within them refused to wane. The first time they'd been awoken by MyMy's screaming had them running into their parents' bedroom, determined to fight off midnight monsters or a prowler or some other such threat, Plum way ahead of them in snarling, barking purpose. The relief to know it was simply a bad dream was tempered by their MyMy's choked tears. It wasn't long after that they noticed the little blue prescription bottle at MyMy's bedside, and the strange, perpetual tiredness that had overtaken him throughout the spring and summer.

Plum didn't bark this time, but she did nudge her wide head at the girls, urging them towards their parents' bedroom, as eager to check and make sure all was well as they were. Their Grandmere slept through it all as she usually did. Nothing short of actual bombs would wake her deep slumber, though Madeline opined that even this wouldn't be enough, Grandmere was as stubborn about her sleep as she was about her waking life.

Madeline and Caroline were light sleepers. Unknown to their parents, they often snuck out of their bedroom at night to have two in the morning snacks, the Ouija board their Grandmere gave them for Christmas placed on the kitchen dining table, with candles the only illumination in the gloom. They weren't sure if they ever actually did contact cross dimensional entities, but there were times that the air in the house would grow colder and certain impressions were pressed upon them that they weren't alone. A specific corner in the dining room would fascinate them, the one where the wall was flush with the kitchen, and they would stare at it, convinced a ghost was going to seep out of the seams between the wall and the ceiling.

Prickly impressions gave them goose bumps even now, and they knew that MyMy was holding in some further secret than a silly, mean uncle who couldn't pay his bills and kept heads on plates in his refrigerator in a vain effort to determine cause of death. This secret, however, was not as benign as that.

"It feels cold and damp inside my head," Caroline said to Madeline.

Madeline nodded. "A terrarium, put in a drafty corner. That's what it feels like."

"Does it feel like you need to escape?"

"No. It feels like a place I'm used to. I can get out whenever I want to. But I shouldn't, because I'm poisonous."

"A snake?" Caroline asked.

"A plant. Like hemlock," Madeline said, and Caroline nodded, agreeing with the impression.

They followed Plum into their parents' bedroom, and their Daddy didn't see them at first, he was too busy holding MyMy close and kissing into his scalp, assuring him he was safe. Plum dutifully sniffed along the baseboards and the corners of the room, nosing into the closet and then darting out to check the head of the stairs and listen for any hints of an intruder. She trotted her chubby, stocky white bulk back into the bedroom, tail wagging, confident that whatever threat had disturbed their little home it was no longer there.

Madeline and Caroline crawled into bed with their parents, encircling MyMy in a tight hug. "It was just a bad dream," Caroline assured him.

"Bad dreams can't harm you," Madeline reminded him, copying the officious, prim voice that MyMy used when soothing them from their own nightmares. "Don't worry, MyMy, Caroline and I are working on something that can contain them. In the meantime, we'll just stay here with you for the rest of the night."

"So you won't be scared," Caroline added.

Plum hopped onto the bed as Caroline and Madeline clamoured into it, their fathers flanking them and pushed to the very edges, limbs overhanging the mattress. Caroline clutched her MyMy's stomach, her messy tangle of blonde curls tucked in the crook of his shoulder while her twin mirrored the action with Daddy, a stuffed whale clutched in her small grip. Plum marched over all of them until she found a sliver of space at the base of the bed, and she rolled onto her back, tongue hanging out askew, her canine snores joining her family's in slumber.

~*~

Greg Lestrade had a nasty kink in his neck when he woke up, and he was the first one in the kitchen, a happy, well rested Plum trotting beside him, bounding in goofy glee down the stairs and following him until he let her out the back door to do her business somewhere in the wide green space behind their little house. He rubbed his neck with strong hands and tried to will the aching muscles into proper alignment. Mycroft was still snoring in bed with their two girls splayed like starfish across the entirety of the mattress, a stuffed whale serving as a pillow for Madeline and Mycroft's stomach a burrow for Caroline's ruddy cheek. Greg awoke to Madeline's foot in his face. They were a trio of restless sleepers, and Lestrade could feel a bruise in his side from where Madeline had given him an unconscious four in the morning kick to his kidney. He yawned and winced at the way it hurt his neck, his palm still working on the roping muscles leading from it into his shoulder, the aching need for better rest still pestering him. It was a blissful Saturday morning and he didn't need to be at the Yard for once, so blessed be the bloody exhausted, he'd somehow snagged a day off.

He padded into the kitchen in bare feet, mindful of any stray Lego that might have escaped from the girls' bedroom, and having survived that gauntlet he rummaged through the cupboards, taking out coffee and pancake mix and cocoa and cinnamon and vanilla and mixing bowls and the no-stick skillet that wasn't very no-stick anymore, and laid them all out on the kitchen counter in happy expectation. Plum barked at the back door, and he let her back in, the dog instantly heading for her water bowl to down half the water supply of London before tottering into the living room and hopping onto the couch, which was covered in an old sheet. She curled her chubby form onto it for a quick morning nap before her favourite people came downstairs and delighted chaos reigned.

The french press, where was it? Oh, right, in the dishwasher, he was supposed to empty it last night and forgot. He pulled it out and put it on the kitchen counter, the kettle filled and plugged in, the bag of coffee pulled into his grip and a tablespoon snatched out of the dishwasher as well, and for fuck's sake, there's coffee all over the damned counter now, and the floor, and he got a bloody half teaspoon into the mixing bowl with the pancake mix and fuck, was it ruined now? It's probably ruined. Well, fuck, fuck this, all of this...

He let the tablespoon crash to the counter with a loud clatter and braced himself against it, balancing on the heels of his palms as he leaned out and took a deep breath.

The week after the big reveal had been hard on Mycroft, on their family as a whole though they were doing their best to playact that everything was fine for the girls' sake. Sherlock had refused to talk to his brother and Mycroft found the lack of communication between them worrying. It's what Mycroft did best, the man comprised of molecules of worry and cells filled to bursting with worse case scenarios exploding all over the place within his brilliant brain. The fault had become a skill when it came to being the British Government, and certainly he did a damned good job of that regardless of Sherlock's childish, shortsighted view to the contrary. There were far fewer terrorist attacks than would have occurred because Mycroft worried. There were improvements to infrastructure because Mycroft worried. There were better foreign relations between genocidal warlords of volatile countries because Mycroft worried. There were drug cartels limited in their political power because Mycroft worried. There were two beautiful little girls living in their home, their lovely daughters, because Eastern Bloc sex traffickers were brought to rough justice due to Mycroft's worry.

Because of all of this it was imperative that Mycroft come home to this singular place where that constant, squealing nag of 'what if' and perpetual fretting was silenced. For two entire decades nothing could touch him here, this was a safe house, a place of recharge and joy where he could toss off all semblance of his Iceman persona and simply *be*.

Uncle Rudy had made the importance of this very clear to Greg that fated night all those years ago, when Greg had rushed home in a panic and Uncle Rudy's scar was fresh beneath a bloodstained plaster at his cheek.

"Sanctuary," Uncle Rudy's voice echoed through his memories like a snobbish Oxford lecture. "It is as much a necessity as it is a place for the average Holmes, and you, Mycroft, are not to be an exception. Without a place to put one's very human sentiments is to court a dangerous madness that you are well aware of. Your sister has no such place within her, nor I fear does your younger brother, and it is this I fear that creates their deficits. I am relieved beyond measure to learn you have taken on a lover and not only have you done this, but you have moved in with him and afforded yourself a certain standing within his little family. Whenever it's decided to make your union legal, I am sure you will pounce upon it, as you will the opportunity to have children when that likewise occurs. It's ordinary and wonderful, Mycroft, I couldn't be prouder." Uncle Rudy had paused over his murky cup of tea before taking a cultured gulp. "Of course, the risk of Eurus discovering this, along with other nefarious enemies of near supernatural scope that you will encounter in your career, they shall need to be kept in the dark. I trust you understand my reasoning, Detective Sergeant Lestrade? Was the video I showed you of Eurus's macabre abilities proof enough?"

Lestrade shuddered, even in memory he didn't want to revisit the vile images of Eurus's glee in ripping a human being to shreds with her bare hands. Apparently her adrenal glands were overproductive and gave her a shocking physical strength that matched her mental acuity. He got to see her manipulative powers in action, though he still had to wonder how she managed it for any idiot familiar with the criminal could see through the game playing and the cunning play with words. The video was grainy, but it was clear enough to see and hear the psychiatrist who regularly evaluated her laughing as she tore his arm from its socket, tendons snapping like broken rubber bands and flicking thick clumps of blood onto the camera lens. She'd manipulated him into accepting his fate, and to enjoy it as though it were a religious experience. The psychiatrist's smile was rapturous as his eyes clouded over in death. When it was over Eurus had tilted her head to one side, her mouth a tight frown of disappointment, as though she longed for the game to continue.

She was twelve in that video. A right dead ringer for the Omen. Lestrade always wondered about Mummy Holmes after that, if she hadn't joined a cult somewhere along the way and sold her last born child to Beelzebub. He often thought about asking Mycroft if his parents knew anything at all about ritual sacrifice. Did goats go missing during full moons at that country cottage of theirs? Being a staunch atheist, Mycroft would be offended at the question.

So, yes, he did understand why it was of the utmost importance to keep this little life they had hidden away from all evil, and if that meant elaborate ruses to throw Sherlock off the scent now and then, so be it. Uncle Rudy's prophecy about the need for such a healthy haven became all too real during Sherlock's long love affair with hard drugs, a place of solace that didn't just nearly destroy Sherlock but his brother and all of those around him as well. Mycroft didn't wallow in his head the way Sherlock did, he was able to provide himself quiet within Greg's easy company and Celeste's graceful encouragement and when the girls were literally dropped in their lap during an especially stressful raid on child traffickers in Romania it was as though they were a gift for a job well done.

He'd always wanted to be a dad. Mycroft was more wary, but he took to it like a pro, staying up late nights for soothing, changing and feeding the infant twins, taking turns without complaint. He noticed early that Mycroft was indulgent, unable to see them unhappy, the merest hint of discomfort whisked away with prime efficiency. "I see no point in letting an infant cry for no reason," he snapped at Greg one sleepless night. "If I have the ability to comfort them, I will do so."

He could hear the soft voices of their girls gently creeping into wakefulness, Mycroft's equally soft tones accompanying them as teeth were brushed and an attempt to tame their wild, thick curly hair was made amidst petulant protest. When they came bounding down the stairs they had matching ponytails propped on the top of their heads, little exploded brillo pads of tight ringlets that shone gold in the morning sunlight.

"Pancakes!" Caroline squealed, and Plum barked, not wanting to be left out.

"No cocoa in mine, Daddy," Madeline said as she sleepily puttered into the kitchen, rubbing her eye with her fist.

Mycroft lagged behind, his dark auburn hair askew, one of Greg's old t-shirts sitting baggy on his shoulders. He yawned as he hitched up Greg's equally too large flannel pyjama bottoms with a repeating Spongebob print in brilliant yellow across them. He smiled and kissed Greg's cheek as he was handed a cup of coffee, black with two sugars, just the way he likes it.

Mycroft took a sip of his coffee and nodded over it approvingly. "What are those little flecks in the pancake batter?"

"They might be espresso."

The girls turned on the TV and began running around the couch in circles, Plum jumping on the cushions and barking every time they passed her. Her sloppy tongue stole licks on their cheeks, sending them both into delighted squeals.

Mycroft raised a sculpted brow over his cup. "Are you sure that's wise?"

"There's only a teaspoon spilled into it, should be fine." The front doorbell rang, and Greg glanced up, watching as his mother, who had been up since six and was busy reading fashion magazines and secretively smoking her cigarillos in her main floor bedroom, answered the front door. She would join them after the girls had settled down and were eating breakfast at the dining room table, their freshly awoken energy difficult for her to manage in her frail state. He wondered if the cancer was back and if so, how badly. He sighed and poured himself a coffee from the french press and forced the ugliness of that thought out.

"Mais, pardon? You want what?" he heard his mother say.

"Madeline has a sniffle," Mycroft whispered to him. "I think she's getting a cold. Make sure she drinks her glass of orange juice this morning. I crushed and dissolved a daily vitamin in it, you know how she hates taking them."

"I'm here for my nieces," a familiar voice boomed through the little house like a bomb. "Gimmie!"

~*~

***221B, Baker Street, London. Two hours ago...***

"So you understand, of course you do, the significance of its loss." The rotund, famed opera singer Madame Oiseaux dabbed at her smudged mascara with the corner of her silk handkerchief. John fought to keep his eyes open during her exceptionally long tirade which had little to do with the thieving of her diamond necklace and more to do with how her current lover, a Saudi Sheik, wasn't satisfying her more personal needs. He checked his watch. Madame Oiseaux was suffering jet lag and had chosen an ungodly early hour to have her conference with them.

"Sheik Gopal will very upset that the diamonds have gone missing. He so very much loves them more than he does me." She sniffed and dabbed at the corners of her tiny eyes again. She was a large woman, possessing a definitive presence that spoke of the stage and being pampered by every manner of upper class lover of the arts. John was sure she was an excellent opera singer, though Sherlock critiqued she hit flat notes when they were clearly sharps and her rendition of Cendrillon was laughable.

"She lacks fragility. There's no slipper to fit that foot, its ego is too swollen and the notes too strong and purposeful. She'd make an excellent evil stepsister, however."

"Sherlock, she's sitting right there, and...She most definitely heard you..."

Sherlock still had the red imprint of her hand on his cheek. The slap was loud enough to echo down the steps, causing Mrs. Hudson to mutter upwards 'Oh, dear. That'll hurt."

Madame Oiseaux pulled her silk shawl closer around her shoulders, her costume as large, glittering and strange as the woman herself. John was sure the shawl was decorated with embroidered pink flamingos, while her beaded dress was of a coconut tree, with two rather obvious brown beadwork designs at her bosom signifying its fruit. "I believe the thief is the daughter of the Sheik's housekeeper. She is a belligerent woman, of Romani descent, and is as base and lacking in morality as all of her kind."

'That's not racist at all," John said, but Madame Oiseaux did not get his sarcasm.

"Of course not! I am merely stating facts! This woman has resented my friendship with the Sheik since the very beginning, and her daughter is always lurking around corners, like some wide-eyed hawk, those big brown eyes don't miss a thing! I've caught the little rat touching my things more than once, and there was a scandalous afternoon last week where I caught her standing in my ruby heels and draping herself in my gold leaf shawl, a haute couture gift from the Shah of Egypt! I told the Sheik he needs to insist upon disciplining that girl, she has no respect, and yet he never heeded my warnings. Well, now there's a string of precious jewels missing, what will he think of that?" She shook her head, her many chins shivering at her neck. "I can already tell you--He will blame me! For that little gypsy will never find his ire, no matter her thieving ways!"

Sherlock sat in his chair, his fingers steepled sharp against his lips. He was lost in deep meditation, so deep that Madame Oiseaux peered at him, curious, her red cheeks puffed in annoyance at his lack of animated agreement.

Sherlock frowned, fingers still pressed against his lips. He sighed, deeply.

Madame Oiseaux clasped her hands in her ample lap. "So, you have discovered a conclusion already? You know where the necklace is?"

He narrowed his eyes at her, the steepled fingers now pointing at that central spot that snipers love, in other words, right between Madame Oiseaux's eyes.

"He hid an entire family from me."

John groaned in his seat and as he collapsed further into it. "Oh, for fu...Really, Sherlock? You can't give that up for five minutes even now when we have a case?"

Sherlock sat back in his seat with a sad huff, his limbs suddenly loose and akimbo. "A whole family. And to think Lestrade was in on it, it's just such a betrayal of my trust."

"You could never remember his name," John reminded him.

"All those years, I thought he'd been interested in my work, but it was a ruse. He was checking on me, being Mycroft's spy and reporting back my relapses and excesses. He did it to stay in good graces with his husband, not out of any interest in the well being of his brother-in-law."

"He tried to quit smoking as a bonding exercise with you. He rescued you from overdoses seven times. He genuinely relied on you to capture the worst criminals London has to offer. He saw good in you when no one else could."

"I know," Sherlock said. "He would have made an excellent M-16 operative. He's wasted at the Yard."

John felt frustrated that Sherlock wasn't getting the point. "He's a damned good man, Sherlock. A bloody saint. How Mycroft snagged him, I'll never know."

"They've had sex," Sherlock said, sneering. "Regularly. Possibly boring now that there are children and other responsibilities involved and intimacy has to be stolen. They have Christmases together and buy each other silly presents. They go on vacations and get mutual tans. Well, not Mycroft, you can actually hear his skin sizzle in the sun, nothing but shade and 50PF sunscreen for him."

"You pretended you were dead for two years," John tersely reminded him. "You made me think I saw your brains splattered on the pavement. I went to your funeral. The guilt drove Anderson mad. I was devastated, at times suicidal. I had to go back to therapy to deal with your loss. I ended up in a relationship with a sociopath assassin who became the mother of my child."

"Yes, yes, but you're fine now and I'm very not dead so what's the problem?" Sherlock turned to John, suddenly concerned. "How was your relationship with Mary my fault? Ah, I see. I suppose if one takes a careful look you can see certain attributes she had that are representative of me, and she was your attempt at a replacement. The lying, for instance, rather telling of my own habit of keeping you in the dark. Make note, I only hid my own life from you, not that of an entire family. Quite the distinction."

"Mary was nothing like you," John said.

"On the contrary, she's practically my Doppelganger. There's her ability to kill, an attribute that as a soldier you respect and which you have long suspected I was capable. Not to mention the whole easy to talk to but simmering element of danger thing, a significant similarity. Quick wit, intelligence, ability to blow apart the expectation of your universe with nothing more than a silly shake of the head and exceptional firearm capabilities...If I was going to ever become an assassin, I probably would have been just like Mary, come to think of it. Without the having a baby thing, of course, that's still a bit beyond my physical boundaries. Working on it, however, Rosie needs a sibling and frankly there's no point trying with someone else. I already have a collection of your semen and mine banked at an in vitro clinic in Soho, and it's possible we can create a chimeric child using a donated egg. I wonder if Molly Hooper would be keen..."

John clutched the arms of his chair and stared, murderous, at Sherlock. "And just how, exactly, did you get a sample of my semen?"

Sherlock shrugged as though it were obvious. "It was after the Christmas party. You were very drunk and mistook me for your sister's new bisexual girlfriend. You need not worry about your orientation, however, I do have very soft hands and you did remark that they felt like silk."

John had a hard time finding the ability to speak. "You...You *molested* me when I was drunk!"

"For science, John. And for Rosie. I mean you can't give that poor child anything but the best in regards to genes and siblings, truly."

John chewed the inside of his cheek. "You thought I believed you were my sister's new girlfriend, copping a feel?"

"Yes, of course."

"What if I didn't?"

"Didn't what?"

"What if I knew it was you all along?"

Sherlock was suddenly uncomfortable. "I'm quite certain you thought otherwise."

"I know perfectly well how silky your hands are."

Madame Oiseaux was uncharacteristically quiet during this exchange and John actually felt a tad sorry for her. The scandal in her gaze as she looked from John to Sherlock was now quickly morphing into risk of heart attack, and John was not in the mood to administer CPR. "I have a very good understanding, actually, of why your brother would keep his family hidden from you. Primarily because of things like this." John played with the worn threads poking out of the arm of his chair. "Who is going to carry this weird little Frankenbaby of ours, then?"

Sherlock snorted. "I will, of course! I have the physical stamina for it, plus it would be a fascinating study of procreation. Still debating if I want to go full on natural birth for it. They're making remarkable strides in sexual reassignment surgeries these days, and are now using abdominal muscle tissue to create a more realistic uterus. There is the possibility that with a bit of tweaking actual implantation could occur."

"So you would become a woman?" John asked. The surrealism of the conversation didn't phase him, especially since it was one of the milder topics that often popped up between them. Sherlock's musings on where Mycroft's twin daughters had actually come from were far more disturbing.

"No, I'd just get a womb."

"You can't just get a womb, a vagina comes with it."

"I hadn't thought of that," Sherlock said, suddenly reflective. "That's certainly a bonus."

John watched as Madame Oiseaux tried to creep out the door, her shawl a flock of pink flamingos on a black sky.

"We will take your case, Madame!" Sherlock leapt out of his chair and bid John to quickly follow him out, ahead of Madame Oiseaux who was pale and not at all confident in the men she had just hired to save her relationship with the Sheik. "You will have your jewels back in your possession by the end of the day! That is a promise!"

They stepped out of 221B and into the London air with a sense of resolute purpose. "So, you know where the jewels are, then?"

"Not a clue," Sherlock admitted. "But we will need to hire some small assistants to help us, and luckily there are two readily available once we manage to find out where they are being kept."

John didn't like the sound of this. "Are you talking about your nieces? Sherlock, we can't involve them!"

"We are going to find my brother's real house and we are going to crash his porch and he is going to allow me my time with my delightful little twin nieces--ugh, twins, really, how could he!--and he will do these things because the matter is out of his hands." Sherlock whirled on John, the hem of his long coat swirling around him in dramatic flourish. "My nieces sought out *me*. It is their wishes he will indulge. Not mine."

~*~  
John didn't have the heart to call Sherlock's deductive abilities 'brilliant' or 'fantastic' this morning because, quite frankly, he was saddened at the discovery of Mycroft and Greg's little house. Sherlock had figured it out through a combination of hair fibres and crumbs left behind by the girls' shoes, but there was also the nagging idea that Sherlock had in fact deduced this before and had summarily deleted it. Seeing his brother happy would have been traumatic.

He wasn't a big fan of the man, himself, but John could understand why Mycroft would feel a need to keep some aspects of himself away from his brother, his paranoid all seeing eye creating this invisible fortress. What was fuelling his own need to be here was a stubborn curiosity that refused to abate. Mycroft, married to Greg of all people, and two lovely daughters (though they were creepy little things, far too eager to play with dismembered body parts--they really ought to be tested) and from the scratches in the wood on the front door there was a dog, too. John pointed it out to Sherlock, who gasped in surprise.

"That lying bastard! He told Mummy he was allergic! It's why we never got a puppy!"   
  
Furious, Sherlock marched ahead of John and up the front steps. John was more cautious, hanging back and seeking out the usual CCTV cameras and feeling relief that there were none. The house itself was a pre-war bungalow, not much bigger than the average council house and it must be crowded space for four people and a dog to live in.

Sherlock rapped on the door which was opened by a rail thin woman who was the spitting image of Eartha Kitt and took fashion advice from Nora Desmond. "Oui? What do you want?"

"I'm here for them," Sherlock said to her. He took in her loose silk house dress that hung on her thin bones and the shimmering silk scarf she had tied turban style around her head. "You've been ill. I'd tell you to stop smoking those cigarillos but there's no point now, and you know it as well as I do. You're Lestrade's mother, I can see the resemblance around the eyes, and you have his same dogged expression, full of rough determination. You actually enjoy my brother's company and I do believe his love of fashionable pomp is strictly your influence." He glanced behind her, gaining a good view into the house. "Everyone is up? Good."

"Ton frere," she said, a half whisper. Then, shoulders back and her tiny frame stiffened, Gregory Lestrade's mother made herself a force of might against all trespassers. "Mais, pardon? What do you want?"

"I am here for my nieces," Sherlock shouted past her into the house. "Gimmie!"

They weren't permitted access, in fact Gregory Lestrade suddenly appeared behind his mother, arms crossed and every inch of his being near shaking with fury. He didn't look well, there were dark circles under his eyes and he had the hungry look of a man who was surviving on coffee and cigarettes. "Oi, Sherlock. Off my porch. Off you go. Now."

"No."

Sherlock stood his ground, John standing uneasy beside him, not at all sure they were doing the right thing. For a ruse like this to have gone on for well over twenty years, it meant that Mycroft was terrified of how much he was set to lose should it ever be discovered. Perhaps Sherlock was being unkind.

Of course, hiding Eurus from him had been a disaster in the end as well, and her strange incarceration had more than small hints of cruelty to it in John's estimation. Eurus was a monster, but he couldn't help but believe she'd been made that way by her environment. Her reaching out for Sherlock had suggested she wanted something more, she wanted to *feel*, and even if she had made the attempt in all the wrong ways--and yes, people died--at least there was the effort involved. She cared enough to try.

Still, there's that nag, battering around the inside of his skull, the piece of himself that doesn't always listen to what Sherlock says as gospel and instead mulls it over, and thinks and says, 'Not good. Not good at all.' And this time the protest is in the form of two identical little girls with big blue eyes standing on the worn cushions of the living room couch in precocious interest as they stare at their Uncle Sherlock and his companion Dr. John Watson.

"Gregory, let him in."

Greg's burly arms were crossed over his chest. He half turned towards Mycroft who was still out of sight. "You don't have to. He don't belong here."

"He does." Mycroft's voice was resigned. "He's my brother and he's right. Our children have expressed an interest in knowing him, it would be wrong to keep them from him. Please, Gregory, Celeste, step aside and let them in."

They reluctantly did as Mycroft asked, and John followed Sherlock into the small house, the entrance crowded with shoes and what looked to be a very friendly, rotund pit bull with a wide goofy smile and a purple tinged tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. How they ended up with a dog like that was no doubt a fascinating story, as was everything to do with this secreted history. John cautiously followed Sherlock's equally hesitant steps into the living room of the house, which bled into the kitchen directly across from it, and then into a small adjoining dining room to its left. A set of stairs led up to the second floor and on the opposite side of the front entrance there was a former study converted into a bedroom, the husky smell of cigarillos wafting out from it. This was where Greg's mother slept, John assumed, and he hated that Sherlock's assessment of her health was correct. She was too ill to get up the stairs to a larger bedroom.

Mycroft was a terrible mess, and John felt his stomach drop as he took in the gaunt ghost that greeted him, hollowed out eyes meeting his with abject misery. There was only one person who could induce that sort of sleeplessness and John knew, without needing any of Sherlock's brilliant method of deduction, that Mycroft was suffering from nightmares about Eurus.

"You look ridiculous," Sherlock said, though it was without judgment and was instead a question. "That isn't your t-shirt, and those aren't your pyjama bottoms. You've borrowed them from Lestrade because they were handy and you find comfort in clothing that has his scent on it. Really, brother mine, one needs nothing else to tell me how besotted you are. 'Caring is not an advantage.' Ha! Lies you told me to try and see if I was falling down that same emotionless pit our sister did, fearful that I was going to be bad and mad. Caring has clearly been greatly advantageous to you, dear brother. You are soaked to the core in it."

John's attention was stolen by the griddle on the kitchen counter. "Are those pancakes?" he asked, and dared to take over their production.

The two little girls, Caroline and Madeline, ran up to him with eager orders, their huge blue eyes swallowing him up. "I like cocoa, but Madeline doesn't," Caroline told him. "Don't cook them too long, they taste terrible burnt. Just crispy but not burnt."

"I don't like orange juice!" Madeline announced, and sniffed.

"You're a doctor," Caroline said and Madeline pulled out her 'History of Surgery' textbook and opened it to a random page for John to peruse. "Madeline says you must have cut lots of people open and you were in a war and dodged bombs and put people back together like they were jigsaw puzzles. Is that true?"

John plopped small circles of pancakes onto the griddle, careful to keep Madeline's cocoa free versions separate. "Very much so."

Madeline's big eyes widened even more. "Cool!"

In the living room, Sherlock remained standing, his brother across from him, looking far less the imposing Iceman in Lestrade's sleepwear. "What exactly is it you want from me, Sherlock? You now know you have an extended family. Big deal. You have never expressed an interest in my life save for what it does for yours, so do not bore me with your semantics over how I should have told you and that you are damaged as a result. I have good reasons for keeping this from all of you, and I would do it again."

Sherlock shifted where he stood, much of his ire doused. He glanced at the two little girls who playfully waved hello to him. He meekly waved back.

John could practically hear Sherlock's voice in his head. _"Twins. There is nothing more *creepy*."_

"I want to get to know my family," Sherlock stated. "The girls. I want to take them to Marlinspike Park. Picnic. Birds. Trees. Fun. John will be there, and we'll be bringing Rosie, Mrs. Hudson has her now but she'll be with us and we'll do that thing that families do where they lurk around each other and call it happy memories later on in life, though it's actually just boring interaction of people with little in common."

Caroline was the first to squeal in delight. "Oh, Daddy! Let us go with him! If he's irresponsible we can ride the Underground home, we know how!"

"We have maps!" Madeline agreed. "His friend can pay for tickets!"

"They're smart Sherlock, they've already figured out I'm the practical one," John said to his friend, who pointedly ignored him. He handed them each a plate of pancakes which they gobbled down without syrup, chewing on the soft bread with their hands as though they were round pieces of toast. Inspired by their lack of formality, John did the same. There was a strange aftertaste of espresso that wasn't wholly unpleasant, but was unexpected. The girls wolfed down three pancakes each without barely taking a breath. They certainly had DCI Gregory Lestrade's appetite.

"If it's up to me, poppets, I'd say Hell To The No," Greg replied. "But it's up to MyMy now. That's his little brother you want to hang with, and I wouldn't be trusting any snacks he brings considering what's unwrapped on plates in his fridge."

Mycroft stood in his kitchen, a miserable mess in flannel and cotton, their chubby dog licking at his heels. He closed his eyes and sighed, his suffering palpable in the small house. His mother in law cursed under her breath in French and then tottered off into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. She'd already figured out his decision.

"Girls, you may go." Excited exclamations met him as they bounced off of the couch and to their rooms, hammering back in seconds fully dressed and with backpacks already stocked and ready to go. Mycroft held up his hand at their eagerness and they paused, huge blue eyes staring up at him.

"You will keep cell phones on you at all times."

"Always, MyMy," Caroline said, unblinking.

"You will not go anywhere other than the park, is this understood?"

Madeline sagely nodded.

"I am trusting that Dr. Watson will not put you in the path of bullets, however we have trained for this possibility and you do remember the drills we've performed?"

"Get adequate cover and create a moving target by zigzagging to get there so it's harder to get shot," Caroline replied, bored.

"Madeline?"

"Be aware of surroundings at all times and when in doubt use pepper spray."

"You have it?"

"It's in the front zip pocket of my backpack."

"Good." Mycroft then focused his attention on his younger brother, who was staring at the two little girls as though he'd made one of the worst mistakes in his life. "Sherlock, I have certain expectations of you as well."

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Nothing is going to happen to them, it's just a day at the park!"

"Hardly." Mycroft's voice was an eel, snapping and hungry to chew his brother up. "You are making a decision, right now, with this little stunt Sherlock, and it is one that I will hold you to with the firmness of blood. So I will ask you to make it very, very carefully. This is my family, these are my children, and neither I, nor Gregory, will hesitate to put a bullet in you if need be. Understood?"

There was a renewed tension winding through the air, one which Mycroft kept expertly taut. In the past John would have laughed off the bravado of the man, but he was a father himself now and he well knew the protective feelings that could explode in emotional grenades in the close air of the living room.

"Sherlock," John warned. "Tread carefully."

"Whatever my brother wants, my brother gets, so long as I get to be a part of my lovely nieces' lives," Sherlock announced.

Mycroft was unmoved. "You will stop visiting Eurus."

Sherlock was clearly sideswiped by this, he even took a step back. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"You are making a choice, Sherlock, my family or her. There is no room for both. You may get to know your nieces or you will continue to be ensnared by our sister. Choose."

Sherlock shook his head, deductions and possibilities flying through it at breakneck speed, enough to stir the very aura of the air around him. But it didn't take him more than a few seconds to stare his brother in the eye and nod at him. "Done. I won't see her again."

"No visits, no communication whatsoever, she is as good as dead to you, a non existent entity, as she was before, do you understand?"

Sherlock sighed, not at all happy with the arrangement, but he did agree to it. "Fine. But I'm not deleting her, there were too many threads tied and my deducting reasoning won't let me."

Mycroft clearly wasn't sure about this last bit, but he nodded, his mouth a firm, miserable line. He approached his girls and kissed their foreheads, their giggling excitement over spending an afternoon with their weird uncle almost too much for them to bear. They hopped around John like little fluffy blonde satellites, backpacks slung over their shoulders and shoes merrily slid on as they headed out the front door ahead of everyone. The screen door shut behind them with a shuddering slam.

"I will send a car to pick them up in exactly four hours," Mycroft stated, firm. "You are not to accompany them. The two of you can find your own way home."

Greg Lestrade wasn't one to let them leave without a final word. He grabbed John's shoulder a tad too forcefully. "Make sure they have fun, and make damned sure they come back here with not even so much as a microscopic scratch. One mark, John, one little bruise, one hint of a skinned knee and I swear to God, I will kill both of you with my bare fucking hands."

John looked out the screen door at the two girls, running around the circumference of their father's BMW, peering through the windows on opposite sides of it at each other and grinning against the glass. He thought of Rosie, running in their midst, enjoying an afternoon with cousins.

"I'll take care of them as if they were my Rosie," John said, resolute.

This didn't spur the fatherly camaraderie John had hoped for. Gregory growled at this, and if he could bite John's head off, he would. "I should hope for your sake, John Watson, you'll do better than *that*!"

 

 

 


	5. canal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A day with Uncle Sherlock and Uncle John and cousin Rosie. And dead people. And weird birds.

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN TWO STRAIGHT LINES  
chapter five

A late fall day was the perfect sort of weather to raise the dead, and Caroline and Madeline knew it. Their backpacks were full of all the usual paraphernalia--Black candles, camphor treated matchsticks, sage incense and a portable Ouija board which they had fashioned themselves out of stiff cardboard, plain wallpaper and glue. An inverted shot glass stolen from the top shelf in their kitchen served as a rather cramped vessel for spirits, and if it wasn't an ideal house for whatever tried to contact them, they could always explain to the disembodied entity that they were on the move, and a roomier mason jar was waiting for it back at their house.

They had a near dozen of said jars now hidden away in the back of their closet, each one carefully labelled with the name of the spirit and details about its attributes. Some had air holes in the lids to let them out, and others were sealed shut with melted wax, never to be released. They were the naughty ones, who pulled hair in the middle of the night and gave their MyMy bad dreams. The recurrence of these midnight terrors meant that one of their captives might have escaped, or maybe there was a new one that had found them, and it was important that they do their spiritist work on neutral ground to ask questions of other spirits in order to find out where exactly the threat was. It was irresponsible to leave something like *that* just floating about in the world, and Caroline and Madeline fully understood the importance of finishing what one had started, in this case imprisoning bad influences.

"You actually believe this?" John asked them as they ate their peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches, their Uncle Sherlock pacing beneath a tall, white building that flanked the left edge of Marlinspike Park. John didn't try to hide his dismissive smirk, which Caroline thought was rather rude. "You both believe you communicate with dead people and put 'bad' ones in jars?"

"Of course we do," Madeline said, annoyed with him. She unzipped her backpack and pulled one of the small mason jars out and handed it to John. "That one was a murderer," she said with sombre emphasis.

John turned the mason jar in his hands, the lid covered in several layers of melted candle wax in a variety of colours. "I hope you girls aren't doing this in your bedroom, this is kind of a fire hazard." He shook the jar, sending the little broken wooden buttons within it dancing. The label was neatly typed, with coloured marker borders lining the information printed on it. 'Carl Rogers, 32 yrs. Old. PlumBer. Circular scar on Scalp. Murdered WIFE CAROL. No living ancestors. Hanged, 1898.'

"Is that a Scotland Yard letterhead on this label?" John asked.

"Daddy had it in the scrap paper drawer in the kitchen," Caroline explained. She pointed at the broken buttons. "That's how we snagged his soul. The buttons hooked him in."

"Ah. Very interesting." John shook his head and gave the jar back to Caroline, who was beaming in pride over having finally found an adult who didn't start giving her odd looks and pencilled in 'therapy' in the margins of her report cards. Their public school principal gave them detention the last time they'd brought one of their 'special' jars to school.

"We aren't allowed to show them to people anymore since Mindy tattled and said we had a baby's heart in it." Madeline said. A smear of Nutella marred her cheek and John instinctively wiped at it with the sleeve of his jacket.

Caroline groaned at the memory. "It was a chicken heart, of course, to signify the fatal shot when the murderer met his executioner. We put a hole in it with a small drill bit because authenticity counts. Mindy is such a moron. She doesn't understand representative transmutation at all, and we explained it to her *ten times*."

"Why is Uncle Sherlock staring at that building?" Madeline asked. She was rather disappointed that their weird uncle had gone off and left them with his friend and his toddler, which was all right, really, because Rosie was cute and was picking up the most delightful feathers and had a whole fistful of different ones in her small grip that she proudly displayed for the twins.

"Oh Madeline, look! That one belongs to a great horned owl!" She pointed at the large one that Rosie now held aloft, giggling at their enthusiasm.

"Fedder!" Rosie shouted.

"He keeps looking at that window." Madeline left the bench and shielded her eyes from the sun to get a better view of her uncle in the distance. "The one on the fourth floor."

"You usually look for something when you've lost it," Caroline said, and popped the remainder of her sandwich in her mouth. The jar of spirits was tucked back into safekeeping in her backpack.

Madeline was thoughtful. "It must be something important, then. A valuable thing lost."

"He wants to see who would scale that wall, but there's no way to do that, the bricks are slippery."

"That's a fancy place," Madeline agreed with Caroline. "Lots of security, no way for anyone to steal from a room without being caught right away. Not to mention they'd need to know about it, and it's not that sort of place, is it? No one would take anything of *real* value into a hotel room, nothing that was irreplaceable if lost."

"That's for safes at home," Caroline agreed.

John shook his head at both of them. "It's amazing, it really is, how much the Holmes genes can infect a person. Did Mycroft teach you all of that?"

Caroline gave him an odd look. "Daddy's a Detective Inspector, he leaves his files out by mistake sometimes, it would be silly if we didn't pick up a few tips."

"Oh look, Rosie found a raven's feather! That will come in use!"

Rosie stumbled to the bench and placed the feather with great reverence on the small pile she had collected beside her father's thigh. She was quite a smart toddler, Madeline thought, and had a very pleasant laugh which erupted from her often. Dr. Watson, Rosie's father, was a likeable man as well, but he had a sadness to him that gave Madeline pause, and she wondered if there were things in jars that had escaped and haunted him, too. Madeline gave up on her Uncle Sherlock and sat back on the bench with John, her sister boxing him in on the opposite side.

"You won't tell MyMy about the jars, will you? He gets very upset when we talk about dead people, even if he does let us watch old Vincent Price movies."

"The Bat is my favourite!" Madeline exclaimed.

"Daddy doesn't mind, but MyMy thinks we are wallowing in superstition and shouldn't entertain such silly things in our heads. He got cross when grandmere got us that Parker Brothers Ouija board, the special wooden edition. But I say that sometimes there are things that are uncomfortable that *have* to be investigated, because that's where the truth is hiding. Madeline, I don't think that is a raven's feather at all, it's from a related and much more interesting bird. It must have a nest nearby."

"It could be a crow," Madeline offered.

"No, no, it's definitely a different sort of bird."

Their Uncle Sherlock finally came back to them, the collar of his long jacket turned up, his shoulders hunched as though it was cold outside. It was actually quite temperate as long as one kept moving. They'd been playing on the swings and climbing bars for what felt like hours, and Madeline's limbs felt shaky from the exertion. She ran and Rosie chased her, from one end of the park to the other before circling back to the bench and collapsing onto the ground, rolling in wood chips and giggles with the energetic toddler. Caroline fidgeted beside John and counted the feathers Rosie had collected. Twelve in all, and two belonging to that strange bird Madeline had mistaken for a raven.

"There's no way anyone could have scaled that wall, the outside is too smooth for a proper grip and the paint on its surface is fresh and slippery," Sherlock said to John. "And the security inside is too complete. I have to wonder why she would be bring that necklace to her room and leave it there in the first place, it can't possibly have the value attached to it that she believes it does. No, she has a different motive in mind other than impressing her Sheik."

He had a distracted air about him that their Daddy sometimes got when he was concentrating hard on a difficult case, and Madeline, knowing how her own father acted during those obsessive moments, rummaged in the picnic basket John had brought with him and took out a Nutella sandwich, which she handed to her uncle, along with an orange juice box. She sniffed, and John handed her a tissue.

Sherlock took the sandwich from her and picked it apart, still distracted. He made a face and poked his fingers around the lid of the picnic basket. "Aren't there any crisps? What's the point of a picnic without crisps?"

"There's a potato samosa on the bottom," Caroline said, which made Sherlock twist up his face in disgust.

"Good God, is that a salad? What is wrong with Lestrade? We're talking about playing children here, not rabbits catching a wan nibble. Starch, sugar, protein, the building blocks of energized play! Not these sad little cabbage whatnots." He tore into his Nutella sandwich, finishing it in three bites. "As for you two, I gave you girls a very specific job and you failed at it utterly to go off in search of feathers and birds. Is it really so difficult to go and strike up a conversation with that dour little girl over there?"

Sherlock pointed to the housekeeper's daughter who was seated primly beside her nanny, eating an apple and reading a heavily abridged illustrated copy of Moby Dick. Caroline shook her head, Madeline matching the action.

"She's a snotty little snob, we don't like her. She's just like our neighbour Mindy..."

"Oh, Mindy is your neighbour!" John interrupted. "She comes up a lot in conversation, and she sounds rather unpleasant. Do your fathers know she's bullying you?"

"She's not a bully, she's just an idiot. She tattles on everyone, even our dog. Every time Plum goes out in the morning she tells her mother about it, and her mum keeps calling up the Animal Welfare office when Plum poops on her section of lawn. It's not even hers, not really, it's a common space and Plum can poop wherever she wants to and it's not like Daddy doesn't pick it up right away if he knows about it. You don't see MyMy calling about her cat leaving dead mice on our front porch."

"Or peeing on the lawn furniture. It doesn't matter if it's a pure bred Persian, it's a nasty tom cat, all it does is hiss and scratch."

The young girl Sherlock had wanted them to have an impromptu bonding session with looked up and Caroline made a point to give her a friendly wave. The girl turned up her nose and then returned to her apple and her book.

"See? Bloody bitch."

"Caroline!" John admonished her. "I'm sure your parents have forbidden you to swear, mind your manners!"

"Sorry. But she is one."

Sherlock chuckled at this and mussed Caroline's curls with his long, pale fingers. "I'll forgive you this time for not performing your standing orders. But I do have to agree, the girl is dull and unimaginative, she's not even reading that book, the pretentious title hiding the fact it's nothing more than grade school simplicity. Madame Oiseaux may believe the girl to be nothing more than a simple servant's daughter, but the facts are plain if one is willing to look. She has his nose, his slope of brow, his dark eyes and their very shape. She is the Sheik's daughter and the housekeeper is his long standing, demanding mistress. Madame Oiseaux is a dalliance and well the true matriarch of the house knows it. No amount of returned jewels will allow Madame Oiseaux back beneath the Sheik's sheets."

John gave Sherlock a scandalized cry at this. "For God's sake, Sherlock, mind what you say! You can't talk about things like that in front of *children*!"

"You mean sex?" Caroline quipped. Madeline chewed her bottom lip as her sister went into a full explanation on exactly what it was they knew. And it was significantly more than Sherlock cared to understand.

"It's a small house, we hear everything. MyMy doesn't know, he thinks he's being quiet, but sometimes he does that whole gasping 'Oh-oh' thing and shouts Daddy's name like he's crying."

"He's not, really," Madeline added.

Their uncle turned a shade of unpleasant red at this, and for a moment they wondered if they had done something wrong and he was going to hate them both forever and never take them to Marlinspike Park again. But Sherlock wasn't angry, in fact he suddenly doubled over in laughter, his sides so split he near collapsed onto the ground and only managed to catch his breath as he sank onto the bench beside John and forced his lungs to take gulps between howling guffaws.

"My brother..." Tears were streaming down Sherlock's cheeks now. "My brother...Mycroft Holmes...He really, *really* is the *wife*..."

Realization dawned on John's face, though the twin girls were still confused as to what, exactly, was so funny about their parents doing what everyone else's parents did when they thought the whole house was asleep. John stifled his giggles between his fingers, a rather childish display in Caroline's estimation, which Madeline silently agreed with.

"Sometimes Daddy says lots of curse words," Caroline added, halting their mirth. "It sounds like he's angry. But he isn't."

"They always whisper when they say 'I love you'. I don't know why they have to be quiet about *that*."

A pensive seriousness overtook their uncles, which was exactly what they were hoping for. Guilt had its uses. Caroline gave Madeline a sneaky look and her sister nodded in the affirmative. Caroline cleared her throat and both men listened intently.

"MyMy always buys us ice cream when we're out on hot days and cocoa on the days it's chilly. I guess it's a combination of that today, so we have determined a sundae would be best, one for each of us so we don't have to share."

"I don't want caramel," Madeline announced in advance.

"I can't eat pineapple," Carline added. "It gives me spots."

John smiled at them both as he gathered Rosie in his arms, the little pile of feathers she'd made taken up by Madeline, who carefully put them in the front pocket of her backpack. They would come in useful later, Madeline knew.

"Right. Sundaes for all, then! You too, Sherlock."

"I want chocolate," their gangly uncle demanded. "And a raspberry flavoured coffee."

"Of course," John said, and he handed Rosie off to Sherlock who carried her with awkward arms, both Madeline and Caroline holding John's strong, calloused hands as they made their way across the street to their favourite ice cream shop, the one they absolutely were not allowed to go to because the manager thought they were possessed by the witch Carman. Once they were banned the manager of the diner performed a new age smudging ceremony to cleanse the place of their nefarious spiritual interference. The diner was closed for a week for the ritualistic smudging treatment to take full effect. Caroline thought that was a little much, but Madeline appreciated the manager's dedication to traditional indigenous forms of exorcism.

The manager wasn't there today. They'd seen an ambulance stop by earlier when they first arrived at the park and it carted the unpleasant woman off. It wasn't that they wanted her to die or anything, nothing so terrible as that. But her absence this day was terribly convenient and they both enjoyed the elaborate sundaes the place offered. This also gave them an opportunity to talk to their friend in the place where he was strongest.

They hummed happily, hands dancing in John's as they swung their arms to and fro, John's wonderment when he looked on them a slight resemblance of what they saw in their Daddy's gaze. It was a warmth they gravitated towards and just like that, John Watson became the favourite uncle, and was never able to loosen himself from that unfortunate lofty perch.

~*~

The ice cream shop was more of a diner than a dessert bar, and was a tad crusty in John's estimation. The slick green pleather booth they were tucked into had rips in the seams and was spilling crumbly foam rubber. But the sundaes delivered with cheerful pomp to their table were over the top in layers of ice cream and whipped cream and all manner of crushed nuts and flavoured syrups of every variety and fruit and gummies all topped off with a juicy strawberry in place of the usual cherry. Sherlock dug into his like a child himself, opting for Smartie sprinkles and crushed candy canes. John was far more conservative, a fact that irked Sherlock no end.

"A plain caramel sundae. Honestly, John, if you were a piece of paper you'd be three ring lined, that's how boring you are right now." Sherlock pointed to a giggling Madeline's dark cherry devil's food cake slop complete with gummy worms and liquorice bats. "*That* however, is not boring. Look, there's little meringue bones in it, and nougat teeth! Give me one of those!"

John shook his head at the massive mound of cream and sugar now adorning their table. "We're sending them home on a vicious sugar and caffeine high, you realize. Caroline, please slow down, you'll get a stomach ache downing that so fast and I don't think your MyMy would forgive me if you vomited in his commissioned car." He frowned at Sherlock who was attacking his sundae with equal, if not more, gusto. "And that goes for you, too, you overgrown infant. A double sundae with everything on the menu on it? Are you mad? How do you expect your miserly little tummy to handle all of that? It's an effort to convince you to eat a sandwich most days."

Sherlock shoved a mouthful of ice cream into his maw and winced at the combination of sugar and brain freeze. "I luff smeertees..."

Caroline gave her twin a quick glance from behind her sundae and Madeline grinned a silent yes in response. It was strange seeing this silent communication between them, and John was also struck with how enviable it was as well. He got the distinct impression they only talked because it brought outsiders into their tiny, insular world, where the two of them instinctively understood the needs of the other and co-operation was paramount. A single soul in two bodies, indeed. Much as he didn't want to agree with Sherlock, for they were lovely girls, this aspect of them was genuinely unsettling.

"We're going to the washroom," Caroline announced, and Madeline joined her before John could offer any input, Madeline's backpack snatched and brought with them. He wondered why they would need it, only to realize that Mycroft probably told them to keep their weapons on them at all times, and there was probably some secret bombing device in the backpack that would ensure their safety. It was a paranoia the man would cultivate like a garden when it came to his family, John knew, because he was infected with the sentiment himself, especially after the incident with Eurus. There was a stun gun in a secreted pocket in Rosie's stroller. Not even Sherlock knew about that.

"They are odd little things, and a delight," John said, grinning at the carnage of whipped cream and melted ice. "They're very good with Rosie, she idolizes them."

Rosie, seated beside John, was too busy concentrating on her ice cream to think about much else. She'd just discovered she really liked kiwi fruit and was picking at the little green half circles with concentrated study.

"Yes, They're well adjusted, despite being raised by my brother. Lestrade's influence, obviously." Sherlock pushed away his empty sundae glass, and placed a hand over his stomach which was now making unpleasant noises. "This was probably not a good experiment. It seems a person shouldn't be allowed to eat an unlimited amount of Smarties in one sitting."

"A shocking revelation, I'm sure." John clasped his hands in front of him. "What are we going to do about the lost necklace? We haven't found it, and we promised Madame Oiseaux we would."

"This is a bit of a problem, we are behind in a few bills, namely the rent, the utilities, the insurance, the Internet, the cable, the water and the damages which I'm continuing to ignore in favour of the others. We can't afford to not obtain our fee."

John couldn't ask, in that moment, why it was they were so far in arrears and he didn't know about this, and oh, an eviction notice had been given by a very reluctant Mrs. Hudson? Just how far in the hole were they? And oh dear God, that was a complicated amount...

John Watson did not get the full scale of the amounts owed, sums that would send Rosie into debtor's prison at the slow rate the bills were being paid if at all, for the diner's happy atmosphere of ice cream and pseudo 1950's memorabilia was suddenly disturbed by a protracted scream.

Shouts of "Demons!" and "Children of SATAN!" met the crowded melee, which was now huddled around the Ladies' washroom.

John sighed. They'd had such a pleasant day up until now.

"Shall I go, then?" John asked, resigned. Sherlock was a decided sick shade of dark green. "Care to let me know what I'm in for, with that deductive magic of yours?"

"I haven't a clue. They're twins, John. It can't be anything good." Sherlock's brows knit together in annoyance. "And it's not magic, John, you know this. You could be just as good at it if you actually put your mind to your environment and forced yourself to *see*."

"You sound just like them," John said, irritated to his core. "Bloody Holmes's and their bloody awful brains. Get some money from transmutation and scrounge up the tab and pay it. Oh no, there's a woman clutching a Bible and muttering prayers at the toilets, I knew this day was going too well. Mind Rosie for a moment."

John left his seat and headed with dreaded purpose towards the toilets, shoving curious onlookers and horrified waitresses out of the way. He really wasn't surprised to find Madeline and Caroline on the floor of the Ladies washroom, candles surrounding them and the scent of sage incense wafting upwards.

"Portable Ouija board," he said to them, stern.

"We made it ourselves," Caroline said.

It was quite an elaborate display and he had to wonder how they had set it up so quickly. He could discern the small fold lines in the cardboard Ouija board, which indicated it could be compacted into the size of a small paperback book. The shot glass from Spain was a colourful addition, and it was pointing to YES, written in purple magic marker.

"The spirit that comes here used to be a bobby and this diner was on his beat. It's his favourite place to have coffee and listen to Leslie Gore songs." Caroline rolled back on her heels and stood up, snatching up the shot glass as she did so while Madeline quickly folded up the Ouija board. "We asked him if Uncle Sherlock was going to find what he was looking for today and the policeman said 'yes'."

"He wouldn't lie," Madeline fervently agreed. "He's a very nice dead policeman."

Right. Nothing freaky or creepy about that at all. "Out," John ordered them. "No raising the dead in the toilets, thanks."

Disappointed, Caroline pinched out the sage incense and Madeline packed up the board along with the empty mason jar with an empty bullet casing in it and no lid, a label with Scotland Yard letterhead on it proclaiming 'Jeffrey Dean Farmer. 29 years old. CONstaBLE. SHOT in CHEST. 1957. NICE PERSON, NO SEAL NEEDED.'  
  
"There is a time and a place for everything," John said them, and he hoped he was getting across how very serious this was, because the last thing either he or Sherlock needed was having his nieces snatched away by Child Protective Services due to irresponsible Satanic rituals. "And I'm a little concerned that you can't leave this kind of thing alone even on a nice day like today when we've had lots of sunshine and the best sundaes in the whole of London." He paid the tab, because of course Sherlock hadn't, and he added a significant tip to the total for the white faced waitress who cautiously took his money. The other patrons were giving him an equally wide berth, and the woman with the Bible was now rocking back and forth in her little two seater booth, babbling in tongues.

When he got back to their booth where Sherlock was still seated, clutching his stomach, there was an equal tragedy waiting for him. "What in the...? Sherlock, why is Rosie covered in chocolate?"

"Yes, I gave her the remains of my sundae to play with. I'm really not well, John." He glanced at the twins while John got busy taking out dozens of wet nappy wipes out of the bottom of the stroller to give his daughter an aloe scented bath. "What was the problem?"

"They were playing with the devil's ipod," John explained, and he took perverse pleasure in the fact Sherlock had no clue what he was talking about.

The twins had gathered themselves back into the booth, crowding Sherlock while John got Rosie cleaned up. Madeline took out one of the feathers Rosie had found from the front pocket of her backpack and handed it to Sherlock.

"He said you could use this," Caroline said to her uncle.

Sherlock groaned and took the feather, not really looking at it. He hit the tip of his nose with it, the tickle making his face scrunch in thought. "No way to get in the room without being seen, no way to scale the wall to gain access. No real value attached to the necklace save for Madame Oiseaux's insistence that the Sheik will use it as a handy excuse to be rid of her company. The jewellery wasn't worth the amount of effort it would have taken to steal it in the first place. No evidence of ropes or pulleys. The jewels simply flew away." He drew the feather across his lips.

His daughter was finally looking at least slightly more presentable, though there were chocolate smears all over her pink jacket. He pointed at Sherlock in an effort to distract her so he could scrub her other stained cheek. "Look, Rosie. Sherlock is holding that crow feather you found."

"Fedder," Rosie said.

"It's not a crow's feather. Not a raven's, either," Madeline corrected.

Sherlock pulled it away and blithely inspected it.

Shock coursed through Sherlock like an electric charge. He leapt from the booth and ran out of the diner, leaving three small children and a very confused John Watson behind. He was gone a near minute before he sheepishly returned, the door to the diner held open for all of them. "I know where the jewels are," he explained. He touched the feather to his cap. "They really did fly away."

~*~

Madame Oiseaux wrote them a cheque on the spot, using the folded bulk of the twin's Ouija board to write all those wonderful extra zeros on it. Sherlock, who wasn't feeling well after his Smartie experiment, had fallen out of the tree he'd climbed twice and then was sick on the pavement before he had a third go of it and found the nest, high up in the branches closest to Madame Oiseaux's window.

" _Pica pica_  of the genus _Corvidae_. The magpie is a fascinating bird," he further explained. "They are known to be thieves, attracted to all things that glitter and they like to line their nests with decorative pieces of trash. I believe you had your hotel window open and the magpie caught a glint of your diamond necklace, which you had placed on your dressing table inches away from the windowsill. Unknown to you, the magpie flew in, stole its prize and brought it back to its nest. Fascinating creatures, instinct the cause and not crime. One can hardly arrest a bird. I suggest if you warble in future, Madame Oiseaux, you do so with the windows shut."

She got a vicious look in her eye at this slight, and John was quick to snatch the cheque out from her meaty hand, as well as the Ouija board, which Madeline shoved back into her pack. As soon as she left, the distinctive black car that John long associated with Mycroft arrived, and the girls let out a mutual cry of anguish that their visit with their wonderfully weird uncles was over.

"I wouldn't go that far," Sherlock said, getting into back seat of the car well ahead of them. "I said a day of it, and that is what we are going to have. Four hours is hardly a measure against an entire lifetime! Come on, John. A little ride around the Mall to celebrate, I should think!"

John wasn't at all sure this was a good idea, especially since they'd skirted around the whole 'stay at the park and don't move from it' thing by going to the diner, and they did involve the girls in a case (which he was sure Lestrade was going to pummel the life out of them for) and there was far too much sugar consumed and they were taking a ride in a car they were expressly forbidden to go in. But Sherlock was high on his success and he had his macabre twin nieces to thank for it and nothing was going to dampen his efforts to weasel his way into their lives further. Madeline and Caroline had proven themselves to be Interesting. A fatal blow against Sherlock involvement if ever there was one.

In typical Holmes style the twins did not waste time asking the most uncomfortable question possible.

"Who is Eurus?" Caroline asked.

"We need to know if we can jar her," Madeline said, her face very serious, a mask that was such a perfect match with Mycroft's Iceman glare John had to wonder if in fact they truly did share DNA with the man.

John tensed, wondering how much they should reveal to them, the close atmosphere in the car suddenly suffocating for surely this topic was definitely one that they weren't allowed to broach with the girls, a black hole of a secret that had been so guarded their very existence had been shut out from their own extended family.

Sherlock didn't hesitate. "Eurus is your aunt and she is very, very sick. Not sick in the way you get a cold or a flu, but sick in the way she thinks. She hurts people with her sickness. She can be dangerous."

"Like rabies," Caroline whispered, and Sherlock nodded.

"You won't be allowed to see her anymore because of us," Madeline said. "You promised MyMy."

"I did," Sherlock replied. He looked to John for support, but John could only stare blankly, shell shocked that this conversation had even started. Rosie fussed in her car seat and John undid the zipper on her jacket. Caroline gave her an owl's feather to occupy her busy hands.

"You should be happy about that," Madeline said, that eerily familiar stark seriousness masking her childish features into solemnity. "MyMy has been very sick, too. He takes these funny blue pills at night and they make him tired all the time. He's not getting better. He still wakes up yelling and crying and shouting that we're all dead and Caroline and I, we'd get so scared, but now we're used to it and I think that's worse." Madeline picked at her thumbnail. "We had our cousins at the house all summer to keep us from noticing how bad he's feeling. He was home for months but it was like he wasn't there. Our cousins got chunks of wood and wrecked our dryer and all of our nice summer dresses got ruined. They're really stupid. MyMy didn't yell at them once and he'd never let them get away with dumb stuff like that before."

John felt his heart drop. He tried not to let it show, the depth of his understanding, the nightmares, the constant slow ache of terror that rode along the periphery of everything he knew reality to be. He'd come home from a war and he'd seen bodies blown apart and he'd been a broken man, in many ways he was a broken man still. And despite the lingering anger he had with the man, he couldn't find it in himself not to feel empathy for what Mycroft was going through, for he understand that level of hell all too intimately.

Sherlock gave him a guarded glare from his seat across from him. "John. Don't."

John let out a shaky breath. "I know what he's going through."

"You had very different sentiments during the ordeal, you hinted more than once that Mycroft brought this on himself, that all the lies and secrecy and doing what he did made things far worse. So much of what happened could have been avoided if I'd only known..."

"Do you really still believe that?" John asked, pain tugging at his memory. "Sherlock, she is a master of manipulation, she can twist anyone around her finger and much as I like to think that I am of strong enough mind, perhaps in those moments between torturing us she had found a way to tweak my thoughts in alignment with her, making me see her as a victim. The longer I stand outside of it, the more time goes on, I can't help but think that she'd made that happen somehow. She killed people, Sherlock, in cold blood and felt nothing." John cautiously glanced at both Madeline and Caroline before continuing. "Even now, I think about her age when she was incarcerated, that she could have been miraculously healed with a bit of understanding and it's all the influence of her environment. But that's not true."

"If I had been in her life to influence her things would have been different," Sherlock insisted.

John shook his head. "No. There's that nag again, this thing deep inside my gut that says 'Stop, you're wrong.' I can't let it slide." He leaned forward, forcing Sherlock into his confidence. "This is part of her game, now that I'm outside of it I can see it clearly, but you can't because she keeps feeding you her poison. She keeps making herself seem a victim, a fragile waif who only wanted her baby brother to pay attention to her. Who just wanted a bit of his love. She is taking your feelings and pulling them back over you until all you see is yourself. She's a mirror turned around the wrong way."

Sherlock shook his head, his jaw working over his words, angry. "You don't understand, I've made progress with her when no one else could."

"She's playing to your ego. Come on, Sherlock, all you really know of her are the Coles Notes Mycroft gave you, and they were brutal enough. She killed a child. The only person who came close to understanding her was Moriarity, and she managed to kill him, too."

"Moriarity killed himself."

"She influenced him. She was the true catalyst, not you. She manipulated him the same way she's now using you. She's playing with your ego, stroking it just enough to make you think you're making headway. You're the favourite child come to rescue her, it's the same story, she's appealing to that narcissistic streak of yours. Think about it, Sherlock! She's acting. She's already got a new game in mind." John shook his head, suddenly fearful of the clarity opened up to him. "Mycroft is right, you can't visit her anymore, Sherlock. She's dangerous. She's close to being the devil himself and, frankly, he might even be frightened of her."

The rest of the ride to the Lestrade-Holmes home was spent in silence, Sherlock brooding over what John had said. He didn't like having to lay the facts out so bare to his friend, but he also knew that this was the kind of data Sherlock needed to properly assess any situation, and from the hurt ache he felt emanating from his friend he knew that Sherlock understood he was right.

"I was thinking of going against Mycroft's wishes. Sneaking over there to visit," he admitted to John.

John nodded. "I know you were."

"I won't now." Sherlock gave both his nieces a forced smile. "It seems there are two very smart, lovely young ladies who have stolen my full attention instead. Tell me, did you like helping me with this case? I found your insights oddly compelling, though I'm still at a loss as to where they came from. How does your method of deduction work?"

Madeline gave him a wide grin, which was matched by Caroline's. "We ask things!" Caroline exclaimed.

Sherlock shrugged at this, and John found his friend's forced good humour endearing. "What kind of things?"

Madeline gave him a cherub's grin. "Why are there birds that steal?"

"Why do people like rocks over love?" Caroline added.

"Why is there a ghost in the corner of our dining room, watching us?"

"Why do people die? Why do they live?"

"Why do people even know to ask why?"

They really were exceptional girls, John thought, but he couldn't be sure if that higher reasoning they possessed was Holmes in nature after all. These were the kinds of metaphysical questions asked by philosophers through every age, but the way Madeline and Caroline attacked the questions was with such elated wonder they veered far off the course of Holmesian deduction and instead were content to bathe in the dark warmth of the mysterious, taking great delight in the question and not the answer.

Where on earth did these little oracles come from?

The car pulled up in front of the house and it was Lestrade's mother who greeted them at the door. She was not at all happy to see Sherlock and John in attendance, her thin arms guiding the girls into the house as they began chattering to an unseen Lestrade about the many adventures of their day. John doubted they'd mention the whole policeman in a jar thing, and he hoped there wouldn't be too much information given about the Madame Oiseaux case. From what he could overhear their excited hyperactive sugar high was now in full force and the only real information their father was getting was that they had a lot of fun with their wacky uncles and little cousin Rosie was very sweet and easy to please for a two year old.

"Mes cheris, you have homework, do not forget! You have a test, en anglais demain!" Smoke from her cigarillo curled within the air above her small body like an enchanted snake. "Is there something more? You don't know how to go home? Allez-vous en. Go."

Sherlock cleared his throat. "I wish to talk to my brother."

"Non. He is sleeping and you will not disturb him."

Lestrade's mother glanced over her shoulder, ensuring she was alone before she stepped outside, shutting the front door behind her. A gentle breeze pulled at her silk house dress, her thin body dwarfed even more within it. Yet she seemed immovable, as though if they tried to rush the door she would suddenly become a mountain, impossible to cross. "C'est ma famille," she said to them. "I do know you, Sherlock Holmes, for how could I not? I have taken care of your brother for twenty-one years, and well I know how things have been between you. I remember how much he wanted to tell you about his little family, here. How he wanted to go against his Uncle Rudy and bring you here as well, to find that quiet that he so needs. But you were selfish, non? You were impulsive, too good to listen to reason, too out of control in your own head and would not care about how what you did hurt others. You turned to those drugs, and you were lost, and in that time, my poor Mycroft, that poor boy, you took so many years of life from him, the way he worried! All those times he thought you were dead of overdose, all those times you broke him and all those times my son had to piece him back together. So much cruelty, and you dare to be the hurt one! You dare to stand there and make demands when what he really should have done was abandon you completely!"

Lestrade's mother stepped closer and both Sherlock and John felt compelled to step back from her, the force of her will enough to topple a king. "He has forgiven you. But this is my house. I have no blood tied to you and I do not need to extend to you that courtesy. He is safe here, and that is all you need to know. If you want to see my granddaughters, that is a choice they will make and they will go to your home on their own. Do not darken my step again with your wicked, selfish demanding and your self entitlement. You have not earned the right to be here. It will be years for such reparation to happen, if it can at all."

Fully chastised, Sherlock and John were left silent, away from the front porch of Mycroft's too small bungalow, the busy family within shut out from them. Perhaps there was a certain poetic justice in this, John mused, for hadn't he and Sherlock done the same thing? They sequestered themselves at 221B, obsessing over cases and delighting in the workings of murder, the adventure of it all a bond of its own. They didn't let anyone else in, either. In retrospect what was being asked of them wasn't unreasonable.

"We'll keep that in mind," John said, and Lestrade's frail mother went back into the house and shut the door on them, not caring in the least if they agreed with her or not.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do wonder if anyone remembers what story that little mystery is based on...


	6. river

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mummy finds out and it's every bit as bad as Mycroft figured it would be.

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN TWO STRAIGHT LINES  
chapter six

Winter mornings in the Holmes-Lestrade household were ones mired in layers. Ever paranoid that his precious girls would get the slightest sniffle, Mycroft insisted on them wearing snow pants and heavy mittens and waterproof coats ordered from Canada with goose feather lining, knit woollen hats and thick, soft scarves tied loose around their necks and obscuring their small faces. It rarely dipped below minus ten degrees Celsius in London and thus the overkill resulted in sweaty children who would angrily shed their outerwear as the day wore on, losing hats and mitts as a matter of routine, the snow pants dragged behind them in the muck as they pranced out of the back doors of their public school. Today was no exception, much to Mycroft's dismay and he shook his head in dismay from the tinted passenger window of the sleek, black government issue Audi and tutted over the girls as they tumbled into the back seat with him. "No red mittens, either of you. And no matching hat. I suppose it's the usual, you've purposefully lost them the minute you were on school grounds?"

"Not the minute we were at school," Madeline protested.

"It's above zero, MyMy, we aren't snowflakes, we don't melt," Caroline argued.

Their tangled blonde locks surrounded their tiny doll's faces, making them appear as angels who had suffered a rough descent from Heaven. Perhaps that analogy was not so far off considering how they had become a family, and despite their obvious unwillingness to follow his instruction and hold off the impending doom of pneumonia he offered no further reprimand and instead enjoyed the way they snuggled closer to him, their chilled faces pressed against his shoulders. "We made a present for Daddy, and for you ," Madeline announced. "But you can only open it on Christmas Eve."

"Not Christmas Day?"

Caroline was intense. "The gift will spill over into it, but it needs to be opened the night before first."

"I see. I'm extremely curious now." His girls were always so inventive and he truly did look forward to whatever strange metaphor they presented him with in the form of a wrapped gift. Last year they had given him a jar full of black jelly beans and told him to shake it up until he found the light. He did and found two white jellybeans hidden in the mix and one grey one, 'For the purposes of those times when neither light nor dark will work' Madeline explained.

He'd asked why there was so much darkness and Caroline quickly reminded him that it was the dark that frightened a person the most and thus the bits of light had to be properly appreciated. He couldn't fault her strange, mystical logic.

The car curled around The Mall and Madeline bounced in her seat, the rough crinkle of her coat like a layer of static over her voice. "Are we going to Baker Street now, MyMy? We promised Uncle Sherlock we would be early."

"I don't see our overnight bags." Caroline inspected the back seat of the Audi with decided disapproval. "We told him we would be there right after school, we promised!"

Mycroft held up his hand in protest at the high pitched argument that was beginning to brew within the small confines of the car. He could see the shadow of his driver chuckling at the sudden melee, for this was one negotiation that Mycroft Holmes was not set to win. "Your overnight bags are in the living room, you just need to change out of your school uniforms first and..."

"Delay tactics!" Caroline protested and Madeline angrily nodded her agreement, her tiny pink lips in a firm pout. "You're going to force us to eat a proper dinner first and then make Daddy go over all the rules *again*! You do this every time!"

Madeline rolled her eyes and sighed, with Caroline taking up her protest for her. "We always have the pepper spray handy, I don't know why you're worried! And besides, Daddy showed us how to fire a handgun ages ago, it's not like we don't know how to properly arm ourselves!"

"Uncle Sherlock showed us an interesting way to kill a man with a taut piece of wire," Madeline added.

Caroline was in fervent agreement. "And Uncle John was very clear that we aren't to use any of those methods on anyone save for life and death emergencies which he is confident we'll never encounter!"

They both seemed rather disappointed at this last bit, but Mycroft sent up a silent prayer of thanks for the level headedness of John Watson to that weird Heaven that had ousted his girls. "If you are both so determined to be fed nothing but leftover, cold Thai takeaway for the next three days we can forgo dinner tonight and the safety meeting and head to Baker Street directly. But only if John is there, I will not be foolish enough to leave you solely in the custody of my brother, he needs strict supervision at all times."

Madeline nodded at this. "Last time he got stung by bees and I had to administer Benedryl by wedging a dropper into his mouth because his lips were too swollen to open them."

"I called 999," Caroline proudly stated.

"Yes, very capable, both of you, and I'm glad you understand that this babysitting is not in the usual direction. You will call me immediately after first aid is administered if any event like that happens again."

"We will," the girls happily chimed.

"I mean it," Mycroft firmly stated. "I did not like having Miss Molly Hooper inform me of your impromptu morgue visit thanks to Sherlock's emergency room foolishness."

Mycroft tapped on the tinted glass divider to let his driver know about the change of plans, and the Audi headed immediately for Piccadilly Square, where it would veer off and head down Oxford Street before making a sharp left onto Baker Street and John and Sherlock's newly rebuilt flat. The cost of the reconstruction had been considerable, especially since Mycroft had put several more safeguards in place, such as steel walls that were impermeable to explosions, for instance, and a secreted safe room in the basement in case a monster of Moriarity's ilk made an another attempt on Sherlock and company's life. The exuberant bills John and Sherlock received were going to be paid on the public purse, sadly, and Mycroft sent them along as a reminder to at least try and keep his burden on Londoner tax dollars in perspective.

Gregory had already informed him he was going to be late for dinner, so the girls going to Baker Street early was not going to be met with Lestrade styled sulking. He'd been surprisingly genial over the whole overnight with Sherlock issue, encouraging the family connection while Celeste remained wary. "He's family, Mycroft, we can't shut him out forever and the girls have had a glut of my lot for too long a time as it is. They need to know your side of the tree as well, no matter how gnarled up and scorched the branches are."

It was both a concession to Sherlock and a warning about Eurus, and Mycroft had taken the sentiment to heart. Now that they were older and capable of understanding the danger, the girls being aware of their monstrous aunt was a wise course of action, one that was especially reinforced now that Sherlock had made good on his word and no longer visited Eurus, nor had any obvious contact.

As they rolled in front of the sandwich shop beside 221B, Mrs. Hudson was already on the front porch frantically waving the black car down, her grin encompassing the entirety of her lean face. Madeline had texted her, telling her they were arriving early. She'd proven to be a fabulous great aunt, plying them with tea and homemade cookies at every opportunity. He'd always dismissed her in the past, figuring anyone who tolerated his brother and his bad habits couldn't possibly be a decent sort of person, but she had proved to be doting on his daughters and as such his perception of her as Sherlock's geriatric enabler had considerably softened.

"Goodness me, you're dressed as though Nanook Of The North himself was coming for tea! Come on, shed off that silly coat and get inside for some cocoa!"

The girls spilled out of the car with Mycroft delicately following them, up the usual stairs while Mrs. Hudson brought the girls into her flat for a selection of treats she'd made just for this occasion. He found John in his chair reading The Daily Mail with disturbing scrutiny. Sherlock had probably told him about the secret codes Mycroft's department used to arrange meetings. There was one next Wednesday at three o'clock, the details hidden in an article about giant, aggressive rabbits that turned on their handlers.

John frowned over the colourful headline. 'Brexit Poised To Cure Cancer Insists National Front'. Sadly, Mycroft had nothing to do with that article.

"Where are their bags?" John got up from his chair and peeked out the window and over Sherlock's desk to get a good look at the black car parked at the curb below. "Has something changed?"

Mycroft sighed. John was always quick to assume the worst, and while at times this was appreciated it was also a tad paranoid. No doubt this was a side effect of living with Sherlock full time, but he wished the man would not jump to such negative conclusions without an explanation first. "They wanted to come early. I'm sending their bags around by car later."

John was instantly relieved, which in turn put Mycroft on edge. "Good, good. We've got loads of things planned, trips to the museum, the zoo, that sort of thing."

Mycroft side stepped John, preventing him from going downstairs to where the girls were currently chatting away with Mrs. Hudson. "This is not your usual nervous anticipation, something has happened. What is it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

John was a terrible liar. He had a distinctive lip twitch when he was fibbing and his tone always dipped a little deeper, as though he growling through the words only to end it light with a dismissive shrug of his shoulders. This was serious. Mycroft slid off his coat and sat in Sherlock's chair, forcing John back into his and to face him.

"Where is Sherlock?"

"He's at St. Bart's, going over the gooey remains of a drowning victim with a sieve."

It was even worse than he'd thought. Sherlock had resorted to his favourite relaxing activity--sifting through guts to get to bones. "You are going to tell me what has happened or I am going to snatch up my daughters and go home and they will never darken this apartment again, am I understood?"

"You can't use them as leverage," John snapped.

Mycroft gave him a pinched sneer. "Try me."

John sighed and glanced at the front door as though he was convinced Sherlock was going to come barrelling through it, full fury on. He shook off Mycroft's glare and left his seat to stomp into the kitchen. When he came back he had a brown envelope in his hand, which he handed to Mycroft.

"Sherlock got one too."

Tentative, Mycroft took the brown envelope from John's hand and carefully inspected it. It was wrinkled, as though weathered by fingers petting the thick fibres until it was near suede, a special envelope that was to be used for a specific correspondence. The ink was free flowing and uneven, like that from an ink well, and the script was heavily ornate, as though emphasizing the royal importance of the information within.

On the front of the envelope was his full name, and Mycroft recognized the handwriting at once.

"This is from Eurus," he said.

John nodded. "They came yesterday. Sherlock said to wait to give it to you until today. His didn't have much in it, just a complaint that he hadn't visited her and that he shouldn't be taking your side, that you're just trying to diminish him. He tore the letter up in a rage and he's been hiding out in St. Bart's ever since. She picked at all his sore spots on purpose and all it did was prove to him that she had no care for her younger brother, it was always a game all along. It's still a game now."

Mycroft slid open the envelope carefully, keeping his leather gloves on as he did so. Spores of anthrax were not out of the question. But what greeted him was the simple scrawl of his mad sister's pen, a brief one page letter that was more tantrum than threat.

' _Dearest Elder Brother,_

_I see you have made it difficult for Sherlock to visit me. Nothing else explains his absence but your tired interference._

_Tell me, does our little brother enjoy the shackles you've put in place, the thick chains that keep him close, but only so far? Mother believes you be a cruel jailer, and I am ensuring to tell her the truth at every opportunity. She will grill Sherlock first, as is her custom and then she is coming for you, Mycroft._

_Consider it a courtesy that I have warned you. We're family, Mycroft, you can't keep my brother from me. You don't deserve this note, Mother's wrath always hit you hardest, but I felt it was my sisterly duty._

_Give my regards to Mother._

_Eurus'_

Mycroft felt the colour leave his face and his fingers trembled as he held onto the letter from his psychopathic sister. How had she managed to mail this out? As usual, there was a sycophant in the prison and he would have to implement immediate emergency interviews to determine who the weak link was and have them removed before they caused more damage. If she wanted him to regret putting a stop to Sherlock's visit, she now had it. She was much easier to manage when she was pretending to be catatonic.

Mummy. She had gotten to her and thus Sherlock and now...Oh dear, oh no, Sherlock would not be strong enough to withstand that fool woman's insistence upon the truth and Sherlock, misinterpreting it entirely, would be worn down until he relented and confessed all that he knew, anything to rescue himself from her ire and her protracted scrutiny!

"Sherlock has told Mummy about my family," Mycroft stated, and John's instant pallor told him this was true.

"It wasn't like he wanted to, it all just sort of...fell out..." John began, and Mycroft huffed, begging him to stop.

"This is an inevitability I have been waiting on for the past twenty-one years, John, this is not a surprise. That it was so easily done is also not a shock." He tucked the letter back into its envelope and then, without hesitation, he tossed it into the fireplace that had now dwindled to coals, and watched and waited until the brown paper curled black into itself and finally was reduced to ashes. Thus purified, he smoothed down his coat and stood up, ready to leave.

"Take good care of the girls. I will call to check in on them in the morning and I am at a whisper's call away, so don't hesitate to inform me of any event that needs my care as either a parent or a member of the British Government. Are we clear?"

"Crystal," John said, eagerly nodding.

Mycroft tucked his umbrella under his arm and raised his chin in pointed agreement. He would go downstairs and give his daughters a much more relaxed goodbye, but for John only the professional, cold mask would remain. "Enjoy the zoo."

~*~

The call came on the drive home, his cell phone spewing out the aria from the Nibelungenlied. Mummy's ring tone. He sighed and braced himself, his eyes closed as he pressed the cell phone close to his ear. Alongside him London was sheathed in different shades of grey, dark carparks competing with the bright lights of newly built casinos. It felt like a place enchanted, a glamour that obscured London's darker realities like a witch's spell that was meant to fool the weak. His driver instinctively took the long way home. Calls from Mummy put everyone on edge.

Her voice, as always, was shrill.

"You have some nerve keeping this from me!"

"How are you, Mummy? Do you have your Christmas baking finished yet?"

"You dare to taunt me with such trifles! Mycroft Holmes, you are a disgrace! How dare you keep this from me!"

Mycroft's eyes were still closed as he pinched the frown burrowed deep between his brows. "I don't suppose you want to hear the obvious argument, which is the incredible danger my family could be in should Eurus ever discover we existed. What happened to Sherlock and myself, as well as John Watson and several dead people later is all a matter of course for her and I had no intention of adding two children to her vile resume."

"An entire family, Mycroft! How could you!"

"Ah, and there it is. The recrimination, the blaming, the inability to see my perspective, as always there it is, blindly staggering its way through your mouth." He sighed, and though he hated having to do it he knew that she would only hang up on him and call Sherlock and get the more salient details and, worse still, would demand she talk to her granddaughters, a request Sherlock would be powerless to deny. "Madeline and Caroline are eight year old twins, Gregory and I adopted them in their infancy."

"Gregory?"

"My husband."

A quiet moment. "I see."

"You were very much in favour of Section 28 under Thatcher, I doubt you see much at all." A horrible headache was already starting to brew and he pressed his fingertips tight against his forehead, trying in vain to head it off. "Put Father on the phone."

"I will do no such thing! Mycroft Holmes, I demand answers!"

"Which you can get from Father. Please, Mummy."

There was decided huffing and argument on the other end as Mummy's recriminations boomed in the background, her stomping making the cell phone shake in his hand. There was a muffled, displeased question given and then, much to Mycroft's relief, the calm intonations of his father seeped like honey into his ear.

"Now, then, lad, don't mind her, she's a bit bothered by it is all. Before you say a word, know that we both care a great deal about you and your mother is simply hurt by what she sees a slight but which I know was done solely for our own good. You've always been the clever one and a bit more sensitive than most. I've always trusted your judgement."

That last sentence did Mycroft in, and he fought to hold onto the cell phone, his body wracked so violently with emotion he thought he was going to be sick. "I should have told you, at least. Please forgive me, Father, I just couldn't risk it..."

"There, now, lad, it's not so bad as that. Kind of a nice surprise, actually, and right in time for Christmas! Sherlock said you were married as well, but not to who. I imagine she's a looker and with tons of brains besides."

Mycroft bit down on his resolve. "I married Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade twenty years ago."

"Twenty years! Blimey! And Gregory? That lovely young constable who came round here back when Sherlock was still in boarding school, that third one he got kicked out of? You did all right, then, my son, like I said, one can always count on you to make the solid decisions."

"Mummy won't see it that way," Mycroft reminded him.

"She doesn't see the nuance, it's a fault in her character, can't be helped, son. Your sister was hidden away due to Uncle Rudy's instruction and the fallout from that was all his doing, not yours, I want to be clear on that. I've had many a long talk with your Mummy about it."

Mycroft was never more grateful to see his secreted home than he did in this moment, the familiar driveway and the crayon marks on the front door a kind of beacon of normalcy that he hadn't been able to find anywhere else. "That hasn't stopped her from judging me."

"She'll come round, don't worry about that. She just needs some time." Then, in a pointed whisper that he was sure his mother didn't overhear, "I'll try and keep her from the phone as long as I can, she can rant and rail about the whole business all she wants but I'll do my best to keep her from communicating with you until the smoke clears. You know how she is, all the fury of a vengeful god until reason finally steps in and takes a look at her emotional wreckage. I'll call you tomorrow. Take care, son."

"Father?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

The house was eerily quiet save for Plum's happy snoring as Mycroft walked into the darkness and plucked the overnight bags from the couch and handed them to his driver to drop off at Baker Street. Finally alone, Mycroft headed for the kitchen where he took down a tumbler and then a hidden bottle of good brandy which he poured generously. Exhausted and wishing this day had never happened, he sank onto the messy couch with its plethora of discarded blankets and dog hair, not bothering to shed his expensive Westwood suit first since there was no longer any point in hiding the evidence of his family. If those at the Diogenes club noticed he had a more canine aroma, or sometimes had sticky toffees lining his pockets, they never mentioned it. The dull men who spent their days there rarely saw anything past the printed words of the Pall Mall Gazette. Facts were, he could walk in stark naked and no one would notice.

Celeste was out with her Friday Night Man as Gregory called him, a smooth talking security guard who worked at the London Natural Museum and who possessed a thick Liberian accent. Mycroft swirled the cubes of ice in his drink, the clinking within the glass echoing across the rarity of silence.

He thought back to a conversation he'd had with Lady Smallwood, when the girls were still infants. They had fallen into his care as easily as if they were placed in his home by some alien hand and the flow of their presence had been as natural as a babbling stream. He still couldn't quite explain it, the facts were it was all Anthea's fault and a simple clerical error, but still that nag that something cosmic had intervened and curved his life into the direction of a solid family in an act that was beyond his prediction unsettled him.

"No one is ready for a family, Mycroft," Lady Smallwood had said. She sat in a winged chair across from his desk, a glass of wine elegantly poised in her hand. Her teenaged daughter was currently in France on the ruse of taking study courses to ease her entrance into university, but the facts were she was a wild child who had begun experimenting with drugs--hallucinogens for the most part--and the strict boarding school she'd been enrolled it was designed to redirect her more spirited attributes. Mycroft knew this problem well, he'd watched his own brother be kicked out of one prestigious institution after another until finally, at eighteen, he'd sworn all of them off and continued his education on his own.

"Children are a curse," she continued. "They cause you endless grief, rarely respect you, are always pushing boundaries you place upon them, the more clever you are the more they want to outdo you. It's a competition that never seems to end. And yet, there is at times an unexpected camaraderie in having someone who so closely shares your life, one raised within it, for they open your locked doors and force your heart to respond. They engage a level of care within you that is at times frightening."

Mycroft hadn't looked up from his papers at this. "I would destroy the sun itself if it meant my daughters safety."

"So there you have it. You are infected with that feeling already, and it will only intensify as the years wear on. You make any sacrifice, you fret and worry even when you shouldn't."

"And there is some sort of reward for all of this?"

"None whatsoever. Sometimes, no matter what you've done for them, your children will resent you." Lady Smallwood took a gulp of her wine and pondered the glass for a long moment before continuing. "You and Gregory will make excellent fathers. I predict your girls will end up doting on Gregory with besotted loyalty and you will be the soft spot upon which they'll fall."

Mycroft scoffed at this. "Hardly!"

"Oh no?" Lady Smallwood raised a brow. "If Sherlock is any indication of your mothering skills they are spectacularly lenient. I am very happy to know that Lestrade is in this little equation, taking up that disciplinary slack." Her eyes twinkled as she caught Mycroft's confusion. "The only advice I can give you is this: Enjoy your family. They are the one lifeline to normalcy any of us here manage to cling to. You can never let that line snap."

The front door closed with a slap of wood on metal and Lestrade walked in, shaking off the cold and snow from his shoulders before sliding off his black wool coat. Plum gave him a lazy wag from her position on the couch and Mycroft waved at him with the near empty glass of brandy. "The girls are settled in at Baker Street and we have the house to ourselves. Come and join me, I plan on drowning that entire bottle."

Lestrade, ruddy cheeked and gleeful, rubbed his hands together as he stepped into the living room. "Bloody brilliant idea! I could use a warm up or two. All on our own, you said? Ha! Finally, time for foreplay!"

"Not until later, perhaps," Mycroft warned him. He gave him a hooded look over his now empty drink. "Mummy called."

Lestrade shrugged. "What's Sherlock done now?"

"Nothing. This was about us."

"Us?"

"She *knows*, Gregory."

Lestrade staggered back slightly, and then made a beeline for the kitchen, and the brandy, and the ice and the matching tumbler to Mycroft's. He took two unhealthy gulps, shivering over the hot bitterness that slid down his throat and into his chest, its warmth a slight balm against the shock. He joined Mycroft on the couch with his tumbler in hand. "Again, I say, bloody Sherlock. Couldn't keep his gob shut. But it's not like we haven't been prepared for this My, it's kind of a miracle we managed to keep it all secret for as long as we have."

Mycroft pinched his brow. "She's going to want us to go over there for Christmas. She's going to want a relationship with her granddaughters. Oh, Gregory, it's an absolute nightmare!"

"Don't be so dramatic, she has every right to be pissed. Besides, with this whole Eurus thing out in the open now it's safe to let some of your extended family in. I kept telling you that Uncle Rudy was hardly a good example of Holmes genes, I met your dad a few times round the pub over in Chelsea and he's always struck me as the reasonable and pensive sort. You had nothing to fear from him, it always made me wonder why you never put him in your confidence."

Mycroft sadly nodded. "He circumvented Mummy for me, and he's being kind enough to listen to her lamentations over the whole scenario for the next couple of weeks. He was very understanding."

"He loves her, he married her, and had children with her and lives even now with her. He knows what you had to deal with." Lestrade nodded again with his tumbler of brandy. "But that doesn't mean she has no reason to be upset, I can see her point of view clear enough. She's hurt. She had a dead daughter who ended up being a secreted away demon spawn wrenched from Hell itself. Her youngest child became a ruthless, unrepentant drug addict. You were the family's emotional punching bag between those frustrations, and it's easy for her to put the blame all on you. But the facts are, she knows now, and it's time the Holmes clan knew about the extra branches on their sparse little tree. She will absolutely adore the girls and will spoil them rotten."

"She will be very unhappy to learn they were allowed at Baker Street before the country cottage first. We may have to circumvent some nasty sabotage in case she tries to turn the girls against us."

"They'll read through it and understand," Gregory said, waving that little manipulation off. "They are rather genius when it comes to understanding a person's ulterior motive. I'll be sure to get the holidays off, pending natural disasters and acts of terrorism. Sally doesn't celebrate Christmas and she loves the bonus pay."

Much as Mycroft likewise wanted to put a rosy face on the situation, he knew the nuclear fallout was going to be grotesque. His mother would do everything in her power to make him the villain, bullying Sherlock into the fray and forcing him to agree with her when there were far too many grey areas concerning safety and a genuine shielding of their daughters' innocence.

"Much as we wanted to, you can't put them in a bubble," Gregory said, as though reading his mind. "It hasn't been all bad so far, after all, Sherlock and John are a right pleasant surprise. John has just the right amount of fair common sense to prevent the girls from getting into too much trouble with Sherlock and much as he pretends to be clueless with children your brother has proven to be quite the entertainer. He even helped them build a Ouija board that knocks."

Mycroft frowned. "I thought they already had one of those."

"You're thinking of the one with the bell that rings every time a spirit walks into the room. The point is, what you believe can happen and what actually does happen can be very unrelated things. There's a lot of variables here, more so than most of the world's bigger problems which end up having far simpler solutions in my opinion. Children don't subscribe to linear lines of thought, and that's a blessing in this case. It'll all be fine, you'll see."

Mycroft wasn't a bit convinced. He had an inward film reel of Mummy towering over him, every hurt cliche known to the English language and a few others thrown at him, along with quotes about ungratefulness and the cruelty of one's offspring. There would be dramatic tears and booming fury and all with Mycroft as its epicentre. It was a horror he was not keen to visit.

"Are you sure we can't hide out here at Christmas, perhaps claim we were abducted by terrorists?" Mycroft asked.

Gregory took two gulps of his brandy. "Suck it up like a big boy and deal with your Mummy."

~*~

Dreams, violent and loud, kept waking him up. Gregory softly snored beside him, oblivious to the restlessness that had overtaken his husband's subconscious to the point that every time he shut his eyes Mycroft saw his mother moping in the corner of his mind, refusing to budge. "Eight years I've had two beautiful granddaughters and you kept them from me! The nerve of you, Mycroft Holmes! But why should I be surprised when you are so fond of torturing your own mother! I never got to have a proper daughter and here you are with two! And whose fault is that, Mycroft, that I never had my little girl!"

Mycroft smarted at the pain the dream brought with it, a sharp headache that sent a shard of hurt right between his eyes. He hadn't revealed to Gregory that Eurus had contacted him, the issue with Mummy was severe enough and besides, it was just her usual taunting because she didn't get her way. The fact it was sent to Sherlock's flat gave him significant relief for it meant she was still in the dark about his family and where he truly lived.

Eurus remaining in the dark was where she belonged.

'Come and see me, Mycroft' he could hear his sister whisper, above a thick forest, leaves rustling in the high branches of thin, black trees.

He closed his eyes and his dreams strayed to memories. He left his bed and found himself heading towards a rubble strewn village in Romania where a building had been bombed. The name of the village was obscured, but he knew it roughly translated into 'Place Of Walking Shadows'. He hated field work and would have much rather have been informed of the carnage while at the comfort of his desk, but the urgency of the moment had forced him out of London and into the darkness of a Romanian forest at midnight. The attempted bombing of a local Romanian Orthodox church had ties to Moriarity's crime network, especially since the priest had refused to grant several of Moriarity's henchmen sanctuary within the sacred walls of the chapel, citing that it was a place of worship where devils were thrown out, not allowed in..

There had been no casualties in the church since the congregation nor the priest were present at the time, they were all on a sabbatical to visit a sacred river near the village to pray to their patron saint Sabbas the Goth for clarity of purpose. The orphanage next door did not share in that miracle, however, and Mycroft had to wonder at the ghastly propensity of Moriarity to involve children in his deadly schemes.

Getting to the quiet village had proven to be more legwork than usual for the main roads had been washed out thanks to a series of thunderstorms in the region. Through damp, black woods he trudged in rubber boots and didn't arrive until he was soaked to the skin, the tiny village poking through the darkness as though it were a blinking afterthought, created as a mirage by the shadows of the surrounding forest. He was reminded that he was in Dracula country, the birthplace of vampires and creatures that defied death, a place where witches were taxed for their services and had prime time advertising spots on Romanian television.

He had made the journey with several hired assassins, one of whom was Mary Morstan, though he didn't know her chosen name at the time. Even now, in a dream's memory, the image of her stung like a fresh cut. They were in a clearing on a hill overlooking the village and she pointed to the smoking rubble in its centre. "It's a real mess. Moriarity's men got away but we have a lead that they've headed towards Turkey. We've got people on the edge of Istanbul who can head them off there."

Mycroft was grim as looked upon the scene. "How many casualties?"

"Twenty-seven dead. All infant children." Mary bent her head. "The bombing took out most of the third floor, where the nursery was. I'm warning you, that number is conservative."

An oily feeling slid along the inside of his mouth and Mycroft swallowed, trying to force it away. He braced his shoulders against the rain and ploughed ahead of all of them towards the village. "Then we wasting time with pointless chatter. I am here to make my own assessment, and I assure you it will be much more accurate."

Raising her brows at his arrogance, Mary and her team followed him down the muddy hill. He was relieved when his boots finally found pavement, but the chill rain seeped deep into his bones and refused to relent. He marched into the village, ignoring the odd stares from the villagers. One old woman dressed all in black gave him her gnarled middle finger and retreated angrily back into her house. He supposed she was justified. This shouldn't have happened. Moriarity was a problem that was supposed to be solved.

The church had stood in this spot for hundreds of years, that was obvious. There were dozens of people working within the rubble and shouting at one another in Romanian from within the bombed frame of the orphanage. There were already several more bodies of painfully small size taken out and laid upon the cobblestone street in front of the building, wet flannel sheets hiding their deaths. Mycroft steeled himself and went to lift the corner of one of them only for Mary to place a hand on his wrist, stopping him.

"You don't want to see that," she said. "It will never leave you."

Her words proved prophetic, for even now in his dreams he could see the exact shape of each mound, the rain plastering the stained sheets into small, human relief. He stepped through the gauntlet of tiny bodies and into the rubble of the orphanage, the sounds of children crying and nurses frantically bustling around them and ushering them out of the building a morbid introduction to his mission. He stood in the lobby of the orphanage, which was a simple brick and stone structure that had been built prior to World War II and had already been weakened by history, violence and weather.

Mary lagged behind him, chatting with a uniformed chester who was repeatedly interrupted by the small walkie talkie affixed to the shoulder of his black uniform's lapel. She was grim as she walked back towards Mycroft, the other members of her team holding back and helping the emergency personnel with body recovery as a militia styled trucks showed up, ready to take away the dead. She shook her head as she approached Mycroft, and the feeling that he had been dreading washed over him in a thick wave, enough to make him turn away from her and force his sense of guilt inward.

"We should have been more proactive," he snapped as she came closer. "This could have been avoided."

"Unlikely," was Mary's terse reply. "Moriarity's network is determined to create more harm like this, making the impact count. We can't give them any press, they'll look at it as a victory."

"We need to warn people," Mycroft protested, but Mary was resolute, the automatic weapon at her side shifting along her hip.

"We have no idea where they will strike or when. You'll be putting the whole world on edge and playing their game exactly how they want it. Keeping it quiet will force them to act again and when they do they'll reveal themselves."

Mycroft frowned. "That will result in more casualties."

Mary shrugged. "That's going to happen no matter what you decide to do."

He hated that she was right. He pushed forward through the dust that lay thick on his skin and coat as it mingled with the rain, making a thin plaster. He gingerly walked up the stairs to the second and then third floor where the majority of the carnage happened. Through the massive hole in the far wall the church was clearly visible, untouched safe for a few damaged trees, their branches scorched. The cracked plaster had been painted in cheerful pastels with images of characters from fairy tales painted on the walls in a happy mural. The joy had been replaced with carnage, the colours muted beneath grey skies, rain and chipped paint. Dozens of cribs were overturned, dark brown spots staining wet flannel blankets in a variety of soft colours.

"The excavation has been slow but it's clear there are no survivors in this section. It's been two days now, and they are still pulling out bodies from this floor and the one directly beneath it. The problem is the size, they are sometimes so small..."

Mycroft held out a gloved hand, "Quiet."

Mary stopped and stood on guard behind him, frowning over his sudden concentration. She snatched up her automatic rifle out of instinct. He could hear the rain pummelling the bricks and stone, he could hear the distant sound of the chesters barking orders and weeping civilians who were dumbfounded by how an act so horrific could visit their forgotten little piece of the world. He blocked those sounds out and concentrated instead on the tiny keening that was discernable to his right.

No. Surely not. Mary had said so herself, there were no survivors here.

But the sound pulled him aside and he followed it into a corridor that had completely collapsed, layers of drywall,brick, stone and furniture tossed into a massive jumble. He carefully picked along it with his gloved hands, seeking out that tiny sound until at last it became so distinctive he couldn't stop himself from snatching at broken chairs and tossing loose debris aside.

"Sir, it's very dangerous in this section, it's ready to collapse."

"You don't hear it?" He frowned at her blank expression, one that had seen so much of the horror of war she no longer acknowledged the possibility of hope. He dug through the rubble further, going so far as to climb over it despite her continued protests, until he was near the far right edge and the sound was so loud in his consciousness it was making his ears hurt.

He pulled aside a tattered mattress and that's where he found them, two human larvae huddled close together for warmth. They wailed at Mycroft's tentative touch and it was then that Mary suddenly sprang into shocked action, leaping over the piles of debris until she was standing next to him, her voice clipped as she ordered a team to the section to come and rescue the two infant survivors.

He remembered taking off his coat and tossing the wet fabric to one side. He slid off his Westwood jacket and, ignoring Mary's pleas that he not touch them, to let the emergency personnel assess them first, he wrapped their blue tinged bodies in his suit jacket and scooped them both up into his arms, holding them close against his shivering chest. They squirmed in grateful need against his warmth, their cries instantly silenced.

He stared at the rubble he had found them in, and wondered what miracle of physics had created this and spared these two infants when the rest of their companions were dead. He checked them both over for injuries, but save for a couple of scrapes, one on an arm and the other on a shoulder, they seemed healthy enough, if not more than a little traumatized from cold and exposure.

Much later the facts compounded upon those little miracles when he learned that they had only survived because they had used each other's body heat for warmth, and small droplets of rainwater that seeped through the cracks of the rubble and into their mouths kept them hydrated. If he hadn't found them when he did, hypothermia would have finally set in and taken them by morning.

"Get my phone," he ordered Mary and he gestured to his discarded coat. She took it out of his wet pocket and slid her finger across the surface, lighting it up. With his hands still holding the infants in his grip he quickly punched in the security code with uneasy dexterity, mindful that Mary had witnessed it and had already memorized it. He called Anthea and put her on speaker.

"I have two paediatric patients that are in need of immediate care, I am taking them back to London right now. Have an emergency team waiting for me on the roof of St. Bart's."

"Sir?" Anthea sounded groggy. "Aren't you in Romania?"

"Yes, and my assessment here is done. Organize all agents to investigate Moriarity's network for two Romanian criminals with bombing expertise. They will have been orphans at this particular location and will have several run ins with the local law enforcement here in the village when they were in their teens. The church was never the true target. Tell Molly Hooper that I expect her to be in attendance with the emergency team when I arrive."

Anthea hesitated. "The girl in the morgue?"

"Molly Hooper is an exceptional orthopaedic surgeon and I trust no one else to the delicacy of care that will need to be provided. This is a classified operation, Anthea, understood?"

"Yes, sir," she said, still clearly confused. "But these patients...Where are they to be housed?"

"In London, of course!" he snapped and he hung up the phone. He tossed it to the ground and stomped on it with the heel of his boot. There would be no record of his conversation save what Mary overheard. He marched past her and down the stairs and, finally, out of the building and into the rain, his white cotton shirt soaking him to the skin while he hunched over the bundles clutched close to him, safely enclosed in his jacket.

"Mr. Holmes!" Mary shouted behind him. "Where are you going?"

"You heard what I said to my assistant, I suggest you get cracking!" he shouted back. "It shouldn't be hard to find two monstrous bastards from this area, they are hardly criminal masterminds!"

He stormed away from the scene and across the street and into the woods, where just beyond in a clearing a helicopter was waiting. The weight in his arms shifted and he held them closer, mindful of how traumatic the sounds and sudden activity around them were going to continue to be a part of their subconscious for the entirety of their lives.

"Damn you, Sherlock," he muttered. His brother had gone the wrong way, along the Russian border searching for more salient criminals in Moriarity's crew. He'd forgotten that it is often the more simple minded rogues who are the most cruel.

He could hear the roar of the helicopter's engine, and the sound flooded him with relief. He eagerly quickened his pace towards it, his body frozen from wind and rain, his rather selfish, animal consciousness longing for a good, hot cuppa. The black lines of trees that loomed above him seemed to expand into an infinity that he found daunting. He clutched the infants close, his arms aching from the unexpected weight of them. This was a black forest, full of wolves and creatures that didn't quite follow the rules of the outside world. He could easily end up trapped here, with no guide to direct him out.

A white figure stood in the distance and he squinted in the dark and tried to discern who it was. It was beckoning him closer and the weight in his arms was so heavy and the blades of the helicopter were whooshing across the tops of the trees, cutting them down and raining branches and wet leaves over him.

She was suddenly standing in front of him, her wild, dark hair cascading past her shoulders in a wraith's mad tangle. "Bringing home a treat, brother? They're the perfect size. Come to my little cottage, I'll offer you some tea. A bit of rosemary, a bit of thyme and they'll fit right in my oven and we'll have ourselves a grand feast..."

He awoke, choking, and it took a long moment for him to regain his breath. Beside him Gregory was still softly snoring, the rise and fall of his chest in tandem with Plum, who had managed to wedge herself between them and add some snorting snores of her own. Mycroft closed his eyes and swallowed down the horrible taste of wet concrete and plaster that still lay thick in memory on the back of his throat. That his subconscious had made a ghoul of his sister in that folklore drenched forest was a warning he wasn't sure how to interpret. Danger was coming. Eurus's letter had made that clear.

 

 


	7. iceberg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Christmas at the Holmes cottage gets an unsettling shake-up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet you all thought I forgot about this! NEVER!
> 
> I've been working like mad on a few original projects of late (including a sequel to A Case Of Bad Diction) and have experienced a serious stall in my latest book (an Omegaverse styled original that blends detective fiction with sci-fi). Fanfiction to the rescue! Not to mention that it keeps nagging at me and it's about time I worked hard at getting this thing finished. It's so nice to put this on, it's like an old, comfy t-shirt <3

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN TWO STRAIGHT LINES  
chapter seven

Christmas was never a pleasant affair in the Holmes family home. Their mother would wax poetic about past wonderful get togethers for hours as she prepared and fussed over an overly complex recipe for brined turkey and somehow turned the simple act of making mashed potatoes into an exhausting chore (Always use the potato ricer, Myke! A masher won’t take out the lumps!). He had managed to avoid most of these holiday inspired gatherings since he’d met Gregory, and the man had no clue as to how lucky he was that he’d avoided them altogether for the past twenty odd years. There was little joy in the family cottage when the Holmes clan was gathered together, especially with Sherlock in the mix with his scowling hatred of Christmas and its trinkets and the forced happiness that was imposed on them both. They had been miserable children growing up, with few happy memories--Eurus had seen to that--and every Christmas after her imprisonment and perceived death was shrouded over with the unspoken mention of karma. Sherlock blocked all memory of her out, which was not the logical act he perceived and was instead a festering trauma that always lay in wait just beneath the surface, expressing itself in anger and drugs and a Eurus inspired apathy.

Though Mummy was still angry over the lack of involvement she had suffered for the great majority of her grandchildren’s lives, this did not stop her from overtly stuffing them with sweets and affection, his two little girls more than happy to have a surprise extended family for Christmas. Father had taken them under his wing most of all, and was now helping their eager forms into their thick wool coats so they could all brave the chill as they headed to the far reaches of the Holmes cottage estate where he was housing a collection of bee hives for his newest spring obsession. “I’ll be ordering a new queen in June, and you can help me name her monarchy. The last one suffered an unfortunate beheading thanks to the tyrannical reign of Sir Pusswillow.” He gestured to the fat tabby cat warming himself on the ceramic tiles before the roaring fire in the main hearth. “It is perhaps my fault for naming her Mary. I should think the next one ought to be named Victoria, to ensure a long and fairly healthy reign.”

“Bees are very important,” Caroline chimed in. “Without bees, there’s no oranges, nor apples nor grapes. Madeline reminded me that flies can also pollinate, but I don’t believe the corpse flower offers any fruit, and if it did I doubt it would be worth eating.”

Madeline made a disgusted face in agreement to this, and Father chuckled at their reasoning. “Quite right. As with everything in life, we must be careful what we attract. Come along, girls, the tundra awaits!”

It was hardly so, Mycroft thought, not with this soft dusting of snow that barely covered the ground and the wind at such a low ebb it merely whispered the powdery ice against the outside windows, the heat from within the cottage melting the drifts and preventing them from accumulating in the corners of the panes. The back door slammed shut as his father and Madeline and Caroline followed him out, sending the remaining inhabitants of the house into a tense, unwelcoming silence.

“I believe your brother will be here shortly, I just received a text from John,” Mummy curtly stated. “Your brother has always been very careful as to who he picks as his friends, and I do believe he has not been remiss with John Watson. John has always been honest and upfront with all of us and has made all of his criticisms of Sherlock’s antics well known. It’s a rather pleasant sort of friendship, if you ask me, one that boasts of an open honesty.”

Mycroft remained tight lipped at this, the unspoken comparison against Gregory hardly fair. “If you are trying to goad Gregory into a fight, Mummy, you have already lost. He is as clueless against your manipulation as I am adept at perceiving it. I have never lied to you but remained silent, a skill you very much appreciated in me since Sherlock was always so eager to run at the mouth.” He eyed the bottle of wine they had brought as a gift and, not bothering to wait a second longer, he uncorked it and poured himself a generous glass of the heady Merlot. “I also recall it was you who set Uncle Rudy upon me when you noticed I wasn’t chasing after the precious young things who batted their eyelashes at me when I was in attendance at your guest lectures at Oxford. You told him to ‘sort me out’ which is a pretty way of saying ‘Make sure he doesn’t become an embarrassment.’”

“Justify it however way you like,” Mummy Holmes coldly replied. She pointed her potato peeler at the collection of spuds before her. “If there is to be reparations they can start now. Mr. Lestrade, peel these, if you please.”

“With pleasure,” Lestrade cheerfully replied, though Mycroft noted his smile was painfully strained. They’d had words over this trip, with Lestrade feeling that leaving Celeste alone on Christmas Day was the worst kind of abandonment, especially since this was destined to be her last one with their little family. But Lestrade’s mother had been adamant they spend it at the Holmes cottage, the wistful inflections in her speech suggesting she had more sultry plans in mind. “Go to them, mon chere, do not fret! I have a special friend who is happy to visit me on a chilly Christmas Eve and who would love to spend the whole of the weekend avec moi instead of this night here and that night there...He is handsome and sweet and has promised me I will not leave my bed for the entire holiday! So go! There is no better gift you can give me!”

Lovers and lavish gifts aside, the pall of Celeste’s illness was still infecting Lestrade’s forced good mood, a ruse he was holding onto with the thinnest strand of his patience. He took it out on the potatoes, which he peeled with rough abandon, hacking off chunks of eyes and digging into the growing roots as though he was gauging out a suspect’s heart. Mummy didn’t notice, she was too busy scowling at her carrots as she scrubbed them over the kitchen sink.

“Caroline and Madeline are lovely little treasures.” She grabbed two large carrots and started chopping them on a cutting board by the stove. “Although I’m a tad concerned over their obsession with these jars of theirs. Do they bring those with them everywhere they go?”

Lestrade shrugged as he dug into a particularly stubborn eye. “It’s a silly hobby, nothing more. Our girls have active imaginations, it’s better to let them get it out of their system than make a big deal of it. A couple of mason jars with their brand of kiddie voodoo isn’t going to harm anyone.”

“I don’t agree. Having such a macabre obsession with death at such a young age can signify underlying anxieties. If I was you I’d actively discourage such habits.”

Lestrade bit his tongue and didn’t take the bait. “I’m nearly done here. I see there’s peas what need shucking. I’ll get right on that for you, yeah?”

“Young girls like that should be obsessed with puppies and rainbows.” She scrubbed at the last of the carrots like a fishmonger descaling dinner. “A child who gets such things into their heads at that young an age can spoil how they see the world. It can be downright dangerous, in fact.” A knock at the door saved them all and Mummy Holmes tossed her scrubber into the sink with the carrots and heaved a weary sigh. She was imposing as she stormed past them both, leaving them alone in the kitchen with half prepared vegetables and a turkey that was still thawing in a massive roaster set on the counter. Sprigs of rosemary had been tossed on top of it, along with orange peelings and a smattering of raisins. Lestrade gave the near naked bird a double take, and wisely said nothing of its preparation.

Mycroft slid his arms around Gregory’s waist and rested his weary head on his shoulder. “Is it over yet? I feel like I’ve been standing in this very spot for years, I’m a bloody statue at this point.”

“It’s not so bad as all that,” Lestrade chided him, but he clasped his hands over Mycroft’s, the pressure against his stomach increased. “She’s a terror, as you well warned me, and we will get through this. She’s not visiting any of her psychosis on the girls yet, and she does have a lot of anger and bitterness to work through. We haven’t been fair, Mycroft, it will take time to heal this big of a sin of omission. We denied her grandchildren. That’s a hard wrong to get past.”

“She will never understand it was for their safety.”

“She will never see her daughter as the monster she is. She is her mother. Even a bloody tyrannosaurus Rex had a soft spot for its ickle little wee ones.”

Mycroft frowned over this. “Where did you find that spot of nonsense?”

“Sherlock. He took the girls to the London Museum last week, remember? He gave them an especially invigorating lecture on dinosaurs and made a point to include the latest theories. Before he was tossed out for swinging off the jaws of the mastodon, of course.”

“Of course,” Mycroft sighed.

The small moment of peace was disturbed by the usual rabble, that being John and Sherlock, the latter noisily announcing his arrival with a quick diatribe against honoring pagan traditions on contrasting religious holidays while John was content to eschew agnosticism and complained about the sad condition of the road as they drove in. “You can’t tell drift from sheep out there, and there’s plenty of both. I nearly had to get Himself out of the car to dig us out of a ditch. We hit a slippery patch when we were making that sharp left turn a kilometer or so back.”

“Unlike my poorly equipped friend, I have two ears and am perfectly capable of turning on my cell phone and using a weather app. Fascinating gadget, don’t you think, Watson? The time, the place, the date and the weather, all ready for viewing with the tiniest poke of one’s little finger. A shame such actions seem beyond you.”

“You don’t have a wifi plan,” John reminded him. “You just steal it wherever you go.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Watson, you can’t steal air! And sadly, my pinkie does not hold the same power it does in more urban environments. I admit the sudden snow squall was an unexpected variable, as was the sudden need for winter tires, and proper brakes and a rear view mirror...Oh, don’t make me go over the whole tiresome list, I don’t even drive!”

John shook his head as he began peeling layers of wool off of him, his ugly hand knitted jumper stubbornly remaining in place. Mummy was busy in the front room, cooing over the stuffed pillow that was Rosie, her red cheeks and sweaty toddler brow never getting so much as a whiff of fresh air the entire trip. Mycroft frowned at the way she squirmed, eager to get out of the confining clothes and he had to wonder where John got his medical degree when he couldn’t determine when a toddler was dangerously overheated.

“I didn’t want to buy the damned car, you made me,” John whined. “Deal Of The Century, that’s a direct quote. It’s a pile of broken bits is what it is.”

“We have bills, John. Large ones. We must ration where we can. Taxis are a superfluous expense. And I’ve been banned from Piccadilly Station thus thankfully public transit is not an option.”

“We would have made it here faster and safer in a bloody horse and buggy.”

“Excellent suggestion, John! We’ll make that investment the second we are back in London!”

Sherlock stepped into the kitchen, his hat and coat still on, the snow stubbornly clinging to his shoulders which were now as stiff and rigid as his posture. Mycroft blushed and gently eased himself away from Gregory’s embrace, the heat in his cheeks unbearable.

“Really, Mycroft, must you be such a prudish old maid? Where are my nieces? I have an experiment for them that is time sensitive and our spill into the ditch has cut into our time considerably. Fetch them and tell them I have the scalpel and the petri dish and the traps are ready--they’ll know what it’s for.”

Not liking the sound of that, Mycroft opted to stall. He tipped the now empty wine glass still in his grip at his brother and at John. “A tipple in celebration would not be out of order. To have the entirety of the Holmes clan under one roof and not have it collapse is an especial rarity. Really, John, could you have wrapped that poor child in more wool? We’re hardly trudging through the ice floes of the Arctic, she doesn’t need to wear that sweater!”

John picked Rosie up and handed her to Lestrade who was more than happy to cuddle the little imp who, if she was uncomfortable, was hiding it behind loud giggles. “I’d love a drop, thanks,” John said.

Mummy Holmes stormed into the kitchen, her grim expression destroying the happy mood. “The entirety of the Holmes clan? Much as you want to murder her memory, she is still very much alive. Your sister is not here, Mycroft, an omission you very carelessly make.”

“There is nothing careless about it,” Mycroft snapped back. “She is not my sister, she is an aberration and I will only acknowledge her as such!”

“Hold your tongue!”

“I’ve held it for over twenty years, Mummy, and you hate me for that as well! So? What is it that you want? Do you want to hear the truth of her or do you still have that image in your head of an innocent little girl done wrong by her brother and her uncle? I am sick to death of having to remind you that she is a cunning, manipulative killer who has absolutely no care for human life and would extinguish all of us in a second if it meant she could gain some nefarious advantage! We are things to her, and she believes herself the supreme being in all--She is the very definition of a monster and like those of her ilk, if she can not be destroyed she must be contained!”

Sherlock retreated to the sitting room where he stared at the fire, oddly silent on the matter, while John neatly plucked the bottle of wine from the kitchen counter and poured himself a very generous amount. Mummy and Mycroft continued to steam at one another, with Lestrade taking small but watchful steps towards the sitting room, Rosie in his arms, her little eyes wide at the raised voices and fierce tension that had suddenly erupted in the cottage kitchen. With quick movements he tucked away knives and the rolling pin in the proper drawers and eased them silently shut.

No point leaving easy weapons out in the open. Mycroft figured he needn’t have bothered, the words his mother hurled at him were blades enough.

“You were always so quick to judge, always so intense and closed about every little thing. You never approached any problem with the proper objectivity. Sherlock was the master of that.”

“I imagine the chemicals he poisoned himself with on the hour aided in that ability.”

“Your brother had issues with experimentation and he has cured himself of them.”

“I believe it was more the result of drowning out childhood trauma caused by your sainted infant psychopath.”

Mummy Holmes shook a warning finger at him. “You will not talk of Eurus that way! She was dead for so long and you were the one who took her from me, just as you took away your own family and shut me out! Unforgivable!”

“The person without objectivity is the one in your mirror. If I learned such a trait, you were the mistress of it first.”

He could see her large hand tensed, ready to rise up and strike should he so much as whisper wrong. The tension between them was so taut the air twanged with every breath. It wouldn’t be the first time he earned a heady slap from that hand, one that would leave his head reeling and his cheek sore for days. The last time had been just before he’d formally taken up his apprenticeship with Uncle Rudy and became a minor government official in title only. He was with Lestrade at the time, and Uncle Rudy had been kind enough to offer up a disused museum estate near Pall Mall as a shell home should Mummy Holmes come knocking.

He’d told her he was leaving home and had no intention of every darkening the tomb that was that cottage ever again. The smack he earned echoed upstairs and it was his father who had prevented any further blows. She ordered him to never come back--An empty instruction, for he was there on Sherlock’s birthday that same year, unwelcome and feeling the frost of her anger despite the June heat.

“Live with your lover in his home and say nothing to my sister about this arrangement,” Uncle Rudy later told him. “She wants to marry you off, even though she knows that is impossible. She gives me regular lists of potential sprog creators, all lovely young women, I’m sure, and destined to be disappointed. Tell her nothing about this place. She will charge in here demanding and judgmental, I myself have been on the wrong end of that wrath. I will protect you, my dear boy. If there is one person in this world you need to keep secrets from, it is your mother.”

Lestrade’s cell phone rang, a Janelle Monae song that Madeline had made his ring tone. Rosie was balanced expertly on his hip as he answered it, his brows raised as he glanced nervously into the kitchen to make sure neither Mycroft nor Mummy Holmes had murdered one another. “Allo, Maman, q’est ce que tu faites? Oui, toute la monde sont ici, Sherlock et John et Rosie. Non, elle n’as pas a touer, mais...Oui, Maman. Madeline et Caroline sont avec les grandpere. Oui, Maman. Joyeux noelle a toi, aussi. Je t’aime aussi. Non, non, c’est pas un temps por parles avec Mycroft. Non, Maman. Okay. Call me if you need anything. Au revoir.”

Lestrade held Rosie on his hip as he gave the still furious Mummy Holmes a quick nod. He had an instinctive knack for knowing just how to deflect an attack, and Rosie proved to be a formidable barrier, though this didn’t stop Mummy Holmes from pacing dangerously around his psychic fence. “Your mother helped you raise those girls. How very lucky she is.” She turned her barbs back to Mycroft. “She’s quite the secret service agent herself.”

“We were the lucky ones,” Lestrade corrected her. He dared to take a few steps towards her, into the dangerous territory of the kitchen. “Look, I’m not a cruel man, Mrs. Holmes, far from it. We didn’t hide ourselves from you out of selfish interests. I’ve seen what evil people can do, I’ve got myself up to the elbows in it some days. Now I know you got a proper beef with Mycroft and myself and well enough we deserve it on a basic level, but the facts are you admitted it yourself, Eurus is your daughter and will never be anything but that to you. My mother didn’t have that association, she only saw the fallout of Eurus’s actions and a brother-in-law who had a serious addiction problem. She loves her family, as do you, and she likewise did what she could to keep us all safe. She didn’t have the burden you do.”

“What burden would that be? Birthing a monster?”

“Call it what you like, but that’s the crux of it. No point not facing it head on, Eurus is extremely dangerous to anyone who comes into contact with her.”

But Mummy Holmes was having none of it. “There are no such thing as demons, you silly man. Only the chemically induced ones, which Sherlock has already banished. I can guarantee you that Sherlock would never have done this to us, he would have been open and frank about the dangers of Eurus and he would never had hid her away into some carved rock in the middle of the ocean and he certainly would never have told us she was dead!”

Sherlock, annoyed that he was being brought into this argument, marched into the kitchen with John toddling behind him, the glass of wine in his hand spilling over its wide lip and leaving drops of red on his fingers.

“ENOUGH!”

Sherlock stood in front of Mummy and Mycroft had to wonder if he was finally going to be the one to earn her hard slap. As the middle child that became the youngest after Eurus’s perceived death, the family pecking order had placed him on a pedestal of his own, one that hadn’t been earned and that was forged out of grief and guilt. Sherlock’s lips twisted into a slight sneer, only to soften as he looked on his mother. He braced his hands on her shoulders, forcing her fury to face him and his brand of reason.

“Attacking Lestrade is not going to change the truth of what he says, no matter how hard it is for you to hear it. How can you hate this man? He’s the very reason I’m alive and standing in front of you right now, he was the one who carted me off to the ER when I overdosed, time and time again. He was the one who monitored my dependencies and reported back to Mycroft, he was the one who gave me my life, my purpose, when he suggested I start putting my brilliant brain to work solving cases instead of concocting soul sucking chemicals to chase after the ultimate high. Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade is a saint among men, for who else would be able to give my brother any measure of affection when that iceberg can frost a room from thirty feet away? No, Mummy, I will not allow you to berate this man who is not only the father of your grandchildren, the only you will ever have, but also a brother to me in ways I am only recently coming to terms with and understanding its vast scope.”

Silence overtook the cottage, its spell not broken until the front door opened and Madeline tipped in, her boots leaving wet imprints on the wooden floorboards as she rushed towards John and wrapped her arms tight around his waist in a surprisingly strong hug. Caroline, sensing there was an aura of argument in the air, held back, her smiled pasted on as she peeked into the kitchen, her boots and coat carefully taken off and hung up on the small hooks set in the wall just for them. She looked from Mummy Holmes to Sherlock and then she quickly made her way to her favorite uncle, her small spindly arms wrapped tight around his knees.

Their grandfather was oblivious to the residual tension lurking in every furrowed brow, and he clapped his hands together in happy glee, the snow billowing in behind him from the still open front door.

“Ah, the gang’s all here! A merry Christmas all around!”

Mycroft scowled and stormed out of the kitchen, Sherlock gingerly breaking free of Caroline and following him out the front door, leaving their confused father behind.

*~*  
“I have to admire your continued self control, it’s not a skill I’ve been able to cultivate.” Sherlock plucked two cigarettes from his brother’s side jacket pocket and handed him one. He used a BBQ lighter to light them and then tucked it back into the depths of his long wool coat. “She has a shocking ability to make me feel as though I am an infant, and not just any infant but the dullest, most inanely stupid one she has ever had the displeasure to entertain. It’s fascinating the way I instinctively need to provide proof to her of my deductive abilities, and even there, in the heat of argument, I was inclined for just a moment to start listing off how I had solved the mystery of a missing ruby thanks to the help of my precocious nieces.”

Mycroft sucked in the heat from his cigarette and near swooned over the pleasure of it. He felt an instant calm overtake him, one that Sherlock himself indulged. He watched his brother inspect the filter and gave it a sly, conspiring smile. “These are an especially potent brand of cigarette. One might call them organic.”

“One might,” Mycroft said, and he grinned as he took another puff.

“Absolute genius, as always. I almost begged John to give me a strong sedative to aid in dealing with this little family holiday from hell, and he naturally refused to oblige. I’m grateful to see you have such powers of foresight. I brought absinthe if things get particularly heinous.”

Smoke curled in a slightly musky scent around Mycroft’s head. He stared off into the distance, to the rows of wooden bee hives that were now partially obscured by drifts of thick snow. He felt buried out here. He longed to be back in London. “She was annoyed that the girls keep bringing up Christmas ghosts and want to spend the evening reading old M. R. James stories.”

“I can’t help but agree with her there, Sheridan LeFanu is far superior in evoking feelings of terror over a roaring fire.” Sherlock took another long drag and choked on it before continuing. “Speaking of horrific stories, have you had any further correspondence with our dear sister?”

A sharp wind wound its way between them and Mycroft shuddered. “No.”

“Nor have I. Thus, those letters were an act of manipulative mischief and nothing more. Have you discovered the leak in your security?”

“Not yet, but we have put in new protocols. No mail in or out, Sherrinford is now strictly paperless.” He took a longer drag than Sherlock, and held the smoke in deep before releasing it, a feeling of airy euphoria quickly taking over. Every snowflake that fell was in sudden, sharp relief, and Mycroft slid open his palm, catching them.

His hand shook.

“Sherlock, I’m terrified.”

“She won’t find them. There’s nothing in the letters that suggested she even knows the girls exist.”  
  
“Why did she taunt us with them? Why write us notes at all filled with those vague, unfocused threats...What isn’t said is just as dangerous as what is. She’s playing a game with us, and we’ve missed the biggest piece of the puzzle.”

Sherlock sighed as he took in the last of his cigarette, the small stub that was left put out in the snow and then tucked away for later. “The only way to win against Eurus is to not play her game in the first place. Your instructions in the matter were crystal clear.”

“Still a theory in progress,” Mycroft warned him.

Sherlock stared off into the distance, well past the bee hives and into the swirling grey blankness beyond them. “You think she’s playing solitaire.”

“An experiment. She is conducting one, I’m sure of it.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed, a familiar gleam in them that he hadn’t seen since he’d first encountered Moriarity. It left an unsettling flutter in Mycroft’s stomach.

“Then all we can do is wait it out and see what she discovers. We can disprove her findings later. I’m looking forward to that. I want to dismantle her piece by piece until all that’s left is the empty shell from which she springs. I can tell you this, Mycroft, I have a renewed clarity in my mind that is not just the eradication of my malignant arrogance but the unshackling of it from the questions of the past. She doesn’t have the hook in me she once did, not when I keep a firm, objective viewpoint of her at all times. Like you, I have learned to compartmentalize and keep her in a locked box, aware of her but not punished by my memories of what she’s done.”

“I’m finding that impossible,” Mycroft admitted. “I’ve locked her away for so long and yet she was able to dig her way through my consciousness, every day since she was taken to Sherrinford she has whittled against my resolve. For twenty-odd years I have been hyper aware of the danger she presents, and the terror of wondering if you were likewise afflicted. I have been acutely cognizant of how easily all that I have built within my precious family could be destroyed by her in mere seconds. I have gone over every ugly scenario, Sherlock, I have stared her reasoning down with a ferocity that I do not give to any other cause. I can promise you this...She can not harm my family and live.”

Sherlock shook his head at this and gave his brother a wry grin. “I remember someone once telling me that caring is not an advantage. I would say the very opposite is true. To care means to tap into resources one wouldn’t otherwise recognize. That the benefit for all is what makes us human.”

Mycroft contemplated the last of his cigarette, snow melting on his skin and giving it a  
pink sheen. “I gave her no treats this Christmas. If I didn’t think she’d find some terrible purpose for them I would have given her a sack of coal.”

The front door slammed open and their mother stood in its frame, her nose sniffing the air with expert analysis. “Is that a skunk I smell?”

“I just saw it hobble under the car,” Sherlock lied, and he pointed in the opposite direction of the rusty Toyota they had driven out of London. Mummy gave him an exasperated look before slamming the door shut on them both.

*~*

The mouth watering aromatics of a slow roasting turkey filled the air within the cottage and brought with it a sense of peace. The Holmes patriarch snored loudly in his easy chair, an empty glass of wine on the table beside him. John busied himself with all three girls, Rosie, Madeline and Caroline all playing a rather intricate game of Go Fish which included two mason jars that apparently contained the souls of a murdered housewife (circa 1945 during the London Blitz) and a young male pianist from Bath who in 1796 killed himself with poison, specifically a lethal dose of imported opium. While Mycroft and Gregory remained dismissive of their girls’ obsession, and John Watson had only a passing concern, Mummy Holmes was well on the way to calling in an exorcist (despite the fact she was a firm atheist).

“The fact you all tolerate this nonsense disturbs me no end, and I will not allow it to continue. Madeline, you will hand over that jar immediately!”

The shiest of the trio was reluctant to let go of her prize, and she hugged the mason jar with its pieces of ivory shards within it close to her heart. “But I don’t want Richard to go away. He likes playing Go Fish. He counts the cards and tells me which ones to play first.”

“A right cheating bastard, then,” John muttered. “By all means, listen to your grandmother, he’s fixing the game in your favor and that’s just not sportsmanlike.”

“Sorry, Richard.” Madeline sadly moved the mason jar behind her, taking their unusual guest out of the game.

Mycroft was again annoyed at his mother for doing her best to place restrictions on her granddaughters, but there was little he could do in her home, in her cottage, a place where he was most definitely not comfortable. He longed to be at home in their ramshackle little house with its cracked back door window and dog hair littering the furniture. Christmases were usually spent beneath a bedraggled plastic and wire tree that went out of fashion at some point in 1972, the white pine branches adorned with all manner of homemade decorations that the girls had created over the years, along with a few that were fashioned by their father and his sister when they were children. Celeste was always proud to show the ‘Je t’aime, Maman!’ ceramic globe that Gregory had made in grade school, its surface covered in hearts of various size and shape, along with a rough facsimile of a Spiderman face.

“He loved Spiderman when he was a boy! Every cake had to have the Spiderman, every wrapping paper, his pyjamas, he was so obsessed!”

There were no such little imprints from their childhood on the Holmes family tree, they had not only been lost in the fire that ravaged their first home, Mummy was a staunch anti-clutterer and would routinely throw out any small scrap of family history that malingered in boxes and closets. It was as though when Eurus first lit that match and burned them all down that the idea of creating any kind of familial history was reduced to ashes with it. He was envious of Lestrade’s thick photo albums full of people he’d never met and would never know, old schoolbooks still dusty in the attic along with a box full of his sister’s nude Barbie dolls, all of them scribbled over with thick black marker as his sister had decided to give them ‘tattoos’. There were no such points of whimsy in the Holmes cottage, no markers of happier times of Christmases past, no shreds of ancient wrapping paper or half lit strings of lights or tacky Christmas mugs with images of Santa Claus in various states of undress. Everything was neat and controlled here, and what remained carried with it the faint underlying trait of moss and mold.

In the past eight years he’d been able to mostly avoid Christmases at the Holmes cottage by citing ‘work’ as an excuse to leave early, and thus spend the holiday in the happy, contented ease of his own home and family, which was full to bursting with wonderful memories. Like the year Gregory brought Plum home and Mycroft was convinced the dog wasn’t legal despite Gregory insisting “His head width is off by a whole inch, he’s fine!” London held the giggling delight of his girls and the steady champagne and cigarettes from Celeste and a rich breakfast full of poached eggs and hollandaise sauce and chocolates and dinner was Lestrade’s succulent roasts and delicately prepared, expert salads and dressings and all of it ending with exhaustion and wine and collapsed sighs on the large sofa in the living room as they wound down the busy day with ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’.

Now they were in another, quieter living room, with a fire that refused to warm them and a boring game of cards where no manner of good spirits were invited.

Lestrade sat uncomfortable in a wooden chair by the fire, his body too large for its small frame. John was cross legged on the floor with the girls, while Sherlock sipped a cup of tea and brooded moodily out of the living room window at the thickening snowstorm. Tiny pings of ice glanced off the panes. Mummy was in the kitchen, fussing over her turkey, which no one was going to want to eat, especially since she added currents and chunks of salty ham to the stuffing. Contrary to her firm beliefs, dried fruits, especially raisins, did not belong in *everything*.

Caroline, tiring of the card game now that the cheating spirit Richard was ousted from the game, picked up the TV controller at her grandfather’s elbow and turned the ancient set on. Mycroft and Sherlock had never had a television growing up and seeing the old fashioned wooden box tube styled ‘brain rotter’ sitting in the middle of the sitting room was an odd attempt at antiquing.

“Got it at a boot sale in Manchester last week,” his father proudly said. “It’s got all kinds of new gadgetry in it, it’s not the old tube type at all, thank goodness. Interesting if it had been, but they are a fire hazard you know. This is a bit of all right, the frame is solid, and the back of it has been refurbished as a small brandy cabinet. Bloody genius, that.” He took a sip of his amber drink, and toasted the ingenuity. “Haven’t turned it on yet, of course, you know how your mother and I hate the telly. But we figured it would be a proper investment since our visitors would expect one, and since it’s a worthy piece of furniture and it was cheap as chips, I figured ‘Why not?’”

“It’s a dust catcher!” Mummy exclaimed from the kitchen, but thankfully made no further criticism.

The picture was nothing more than lines of static for a few long moments until at last it rolled into focus, revealing a dining room that was shockingly familiar. Madeline and Caroline stood in silent wonderment in front of it, blocking Mycroft’s view.

“That’s our dining table,” Caroline said.

“And that’s us sitting at it,” Madeline replied.

The scene shifted to an old black and white still, or so it seemed, from ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, and to the growing horror of everyone in the room, Moriarity’s grinning face replaced Jimmy Stewart's, the tiny bell ringing from the Lestrade Christmas tree one that Madeline had made out of pipe cleaners and feathers.

James Moriarity’s wide, manic grin was matched by his wide, manic eyes. “Every time a bell rings, a Holmes drops dead!”

He gleefully poked at the bell, sending it into jangling life. “Oooo, that sounds like a dozen!” He stepped away from the Christmas tree, the black and white image now erupting into full on Technicolor as he walked the length of the Lestrade-Holmes living room. Plum whined from behind a door leading to the basement, and Moriarity gave the camera a raised brow. “Merry Christmas, one and all! Though I have to say, that pooch of yours didn’t give me a good welcome. They say they have locking jaws, you know, and it got a good clamp on my boots, but a kick shook it off well enough!”

A kick? An instant, unwelcome memory of Plum having tummy trouble during Christmas two years ago suddenly erupted into his consciousness. He clutched his own stomach, sickened at the thought that Moriarity had been in his home, he had harmed the family dog without their knowing, he had walked through their living room, through their *lives*...  
  
Which could only mean...

“Oh, I see you’ve figured it out. Yes, family, it is the glue that holds us all together and the spit that makes us sick, or something, I really am not good at these sorts of fuzzy wuzzy platitudes. I have to say, though, you really do go over the top when it comes to family time, I mean, I never would have thought the Iceman would be the sort to breastfeed, but that’s pretty much where you’re at here, isn’t it?” He hopped onto the dining table and did a playful dance that broke two plates. “His nuts roasting with his hands on fire...Greg’s fist riding up his bum...Isn’t that how the song goes? Well, maybe the last bit is a stretch--ha!--I have to say, the bedroom antics you two get up to are really far too vanilla for my liking, and far too saccharine with all that ‘I love you’ and not even without a proper spanking. But hey, to each their own.”

“I thought you had broken those plates,” Mycroft near whispered to Gregory, who was as silent and transfixed in horror as everyone else in the room.

“We had a fight about it,” Greg agreed. “I told you I hadn’t! That was two years ago.”

Mycroft’s shock choked him.

“Two...Years...”

“Turn it off!” Sherlock shouted from across the room. “Turn it off!!”

“If Moriarity knew about your family two years ago,” John said. “Then that means...”

The screen descended into static once again, and when it came back into focus all but Madeline and Caroline held their breath.

“Who is that?” Madeline asked, frowning.

“She doesn’t brush her hair properly,” Caroline added. “Maybe she should braid it.”

“Maybe I should,” Eurus replied.

Mycroft felt faint. He could hear his brother shouting, a vague sound that was high pitched against his ear. But it was Eurus who had all of his attention now, and she was delighted to have it.

“They are very interesting, your girls. So intuitive and so strange. Do you know what they get up to in the middle of the night? They go into your dining room and try to call up the dead. A very silly hobby, and not one that is going to produce any result, for there’s surely no such thing as ghosts. And yet...And yet they sat there and looked, right at the camera I had installed, and called my little corner window into your world ‘haunted’.” For a moment Eurus was genuinely perplexed and she turned her attention on his girls. “How did you know I was watching?”

Caroline shrugged. “We always know when someone is.”

Madeline agreed. “Even when they can’t be seen.”

Eurus laughed at this. “Spooks and spirits! As if I am either! I assure you, I am very, very real.”

Caroline was not impressed with this assertion. “That’s what you say. But you aren’t, not really. You’re missing what’s important. When you’re gone, very little of you will be left, because that’s what happens when you’re not very nice. Cruel people wither away and their souls are very, very small. When you die, whatever is left we will put into a jar and paint the lid black, so you can’t get out.”

Eurus erupted into outright guffaws at this. She clapped her hands and gave the girls her widest grin. “Oh, you are so entertaining! So self deluded, it is wonderful! This is truly the best Christmas present I could have ever hoped for.” She caught the eye of her brother, and he could find nothing there, no real mirth or joy or soul, and he shuddered at the emptiness she gave back to him.

“When I come for them, will you follow the trail of blood they leave behind?”

He couldn’t contain his control any longer. The rage boiled and burned within him, tearing his heart to pieces. All hearts were broken, he once said, but this one was nuclear, it was ready to tear down nations, destroy an entire universe if it had to, for nothing was going to harm his girls, and especially not that soulless monster locked away in the basement of a rock! Mycroft bolted from his seat, his hands in tight fists, every vein in his neck red and pulsing as he shouted:

“Stay away from my family, you BITCH!”

The television went black.

He was momentarily disoriented and he staggered back from the TV until he felt the barrier of Lestrade’s chest behind him, and strong hands meeting his shaking shoulders. It took a few moments for him to notice Sherlock holding the plug in his hand from where he’d wrenched it from the wall socket.

“Good call,” John Watson, still cross legged on the floor, said to Sherlock.

“Don’t play her game,” Sherlock warned his brother.

But it was too late for that, not with that threat now openly in place. She knew every aspect of his life, he was sure of it. She knew where he lived, she knew where his girls went to school, she knew of Celeste and of Lestrade...How long had she secretly been spying on him? Were these two years a mere teaser of the amount of surveillance she had stacked up over the decades, her resentment now finally reaching its deadly crescendo?

Mummy stepped into the sitting room and cheerfully clapped her hands. “Dinner’s ready!” She was instantly deflated by the morose crew gathered in her sitting room. “Really, the lot of you are a bunch of whiners. You can pick out the damned raisins if you hate them so much!” She wiped her hands on her apron and marched back into the kitchen. No one had the heart to tell her that there were far worse ways to ruin a Christmas dinner, and her daughter had just orchestrated the perfect disaster.

Mycroft was still shaken. “I can’t bear to eat,” he said to Gregory.

It was, oddly enough, Sherlock who took Mycroft by the elbow and escorted him out of the sitting room and upstairs to where they were lodging. “I told you, I brought the absinthe,” his lanky brother insisted. “Have the whole bloody bottle if you want, but I’d prefer we properly share it.”

“She is going to destroy us.”

“She’s been doing that for years,” Sherlock reminded him. “I think it’s time we started talking seriously about what to do about that.”

Mycroft frowned. “You aren’t suggesting...”

“Euthanasia.” Blunt and sharp as only Sherlock could be. “At this point, I see no other option.”

Mycroft swallowed, his throat dry. “She hasn’t done anything yet.”

“Of course she has, she is six steps ahead of us, always. If she intends to harm your girls, it will happen, and then you will do what you have to do and stop her permanently. If you won’t, I will.”

“Sherlock, we can’t just eliminate her. We’re talking about murder.”

“Yes,” Sherlock said as he opened the cap on the dark green bottle and took a generous swig. “We are.”

 

 

 


End file.
